- Major revolutions occurred in China in 1911 and 1949
- Three themes dominated this revolutionary era:
- Nationalism
- Chinese wishes to recapture strength and power from the imperialist nations and to reestablish China as an independent country,
- Establishing a new political community
- Chiang Kai-shek founded the National Party and Mao Zedong founded the Chinese Communist Party, who competed for which political system should Modern China adopt,
- Socioeconomic development
- The challenge of reestablish a strong economic and social fabric after the years of imperialistic control ,
- Mao's Communist Party was gained by the Long March(1934-36) pursuit of Mao's army across China by Chiang and his supporters
- When Mao Zedong instituted the egalitarian values of communism in China, one effect was to create more equal roles for men and women
- Egalitarian- the opposition of an hierarchy
- Confucianism- to obey the authority
- In 1949 Chiang lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan
- Mao established the People's Republic of China under communist rule
- The "Two China" conflict went global, People's Republic of China was not to be recognized as a nation by the United Nations until 1972, Taiwan(Republic of China) withdraw its membership in 1971
- Officials and public figures who had previously served in Nationalist government who had not fled to Taiwan were ask to stay in their post, but after the purpose of providing informations for younger People's Republic of China officers, they were prosecuted as class enemies
- The Early Political development of the People's Republic of China proceeded in two phases:
- The Soviet Model(1949-57), the Soviet Union supported Mao's effort and provided financial aid to help out People's Republic of China , with the help Chinese Communist Party turned their attention to some social problems in the country:
- Land Reform
- Redistributed property from the rich to the poor and increased productivity in the countryside,
- Civil Reform
- Free people from opium and addictions and they greatly enhanced women's legal rights,
- They allowed women to free themselves from unhappy arranged marriages, which legitimize Mao's government in the eyes of the people,
- Five-Year Plans
- Between 1953-1957, the Chinese Communist Party launched the first of its Soviet-style Five Year Plans to nationalize industry and collective agriculture, implementing steps toward socialism,
- The Great Leap Forward(1958-66), Mao changed directions in 1958, partly in an effort to free China from Soviet domination. The Great Leap Forward was a utopian effort to transform China into a radical egalitarian society, which emphasis mainly economic, the four principles are:
- All-around development
- Heavy industry but also almost equal emphasis on agriculture:
- The labor-intensive mass mobilization of peasants to increase agricultural output by building irrigation facilities,
- The organization of primitive production process to give input to agriculture without taking resources from industry,
- Mass mobilization
- Better motivation, harder, work, less unemployment,
- Political unanimity and zeal
- Emphasis on party workers running government, not bureaucrats,
- Cadres, party workers at the lowest level to demonstrate their party devotion by spurring the people on to work as hard as they could,
- Decentralization
- Encouraged more government on the local level, less central control
- The Great Leap Forward did not live up to its name, the people lacked skills to contribute to industrialization and also bad harvest led to famine, which caused a high number of death.
- Between 1960 and 1966, Mao allowed two of his faithful - Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping- to implement market-oriented policies that revived the economy,
- The main goal of The Culture Revolution was to purify the party and the country through radical transformation, principles were:
- The ethic of struggle
- Mass Line
- Collectivism
- Egalitarianism
- Unstinting service to society
- A primary goal of the Culture Revolution was to remove all vestiges of the old China and its hierarchical bureaucracy and emphasis on inequality
- Universities and libraries were destroyed
- The Chinese Communist Party was divide in to three groups of followers:
- Radicals- led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, one of the "Gang of Four" who supported the radical goals of the Culture Revolution,
- Military- led by Lin Biao, who died in a mysterious airplane crash in 1971
- Moderates- led by Zhou Enlai, who emphasized economic modernization and limited contact with other countries
Deng Xiaoping's Modernizations (1977-1997)
- By 1978, the new leader emerged - Deng Xiaoping who proposed "Four Modernizations" invented by Zhou Enlai before his death - industry, agriculture, science, and the military.
- Under Deng's leadership, China experienced economic liberalization :
- "Open door" trade policy
- Trade with everyone
- Including capitalist countries
- Reforms in education
- Higher academic standards
- Expansion of higher education and research
- Institutionalization of the Revolution
- Restoring the legal system and bureaucracy of the Old China
- If the market produced better results than rigid adherence to socialist concepts then let the market operate freely
- Deng: "It does not matter whether a cat is black or white, so long it catches mice."
- Although Deng instituted several major reforms, he did not support political liberalization
- In 1982, Deng defined China's economic aims as:
- Invigorating China's domestic economy
- Opening Chinese trade to the outside world
- Allowing the development of individual enterprises
- Encouraging joint ventures with both Chinese and foreign investment
- Bureaucracy would be the servant not the master of the Chinese economy
- Restoration of the market as the chief mechanism by which the Chinese economy operated
- Opening of China to foreign trade
- The main emphasis was on the improvement of the rural economy during 1978 to 1984
- After 1984 the attention shifted to industry development of industry and commerce
- Establishment of Special Economic Zones:
- Shantou and Xiamen in the north, and Shenzen and Zhuhai in the south
- Became China's chief commercial outlets
- Given regional autonomy and granted special tax concessions and financial freedoms to enable them to fulfill Deng's plea that the nation open up its commerce to the world
- The plan also trained a million technical students to become the managers and administrators of the new economy
- Sending young technical students abroad will allow Chine to gain direct knowledge of Western technology and industrial expertise
- From 1978 to 1989 China's exports grew by over 500 percent and foreign investment in China quadrupled
- The "four cardinal" principles
- Keeping to the socialist road
- Upholding the people's democratic dictatorship
- Upholding leadership by the Communist Party
- Upholding Marxism-Leninisim and Mao Zedong Thought
- The "four cardinal" principles unlike the four modernizations, they were not a formula for change but for the maintenance of the existing political structure
- Deng saw it, China's first need was for internal stability and China needed a rest from politics and try to make itself a powerful economic nation
- The "democracy" wall
- In the late 1970s the Avenue of Eternal Peace, near Tiananmen Square, became a common gathering place for students, who established the practice posting personal letters and large posters to express anti-government and anti-party thoughts
- The government took down the posters and arrested the more outspoken of the critics
- Wei Jingsheng
- A former Red Guard used the democracy wall to demonstrate and called for real democratic movement in China
- He was arrested and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment
- The democracy movement
- Wei may be regarded as the first martyr in what became known as the "democracy movement"
- Called for Deng to add the fifth section in to the "Four Modernizations" : the adoption of democracy
- Mounting frustration
- After the initial economic spurt of the early 1980s there had been a serious downturn in agricultural and industrial production
- The ending of the subsidy system had created uncertainty and anxiety among the workers and had removed the shield that had protected the urban dwellers from high prices
- Inflation had reduced the workers' real wages
- The growing population and the continuing movement of people from the countryside into the urban areas had led to sever overcrowding in the major cities
- The Tiananmen Square massacre (June 1989)
- The government ordered to shoot thousands of unarmed demonstrators in Tiananmen Square
- The protesters were convinced that the wide international media coverage that they were receiving, with foreign camera crews and journalists from every continent having taken up residence in the square, restricted the Chinese government's freedom of action
- Student leaders also calculated that the government's hands were tied by the imminent arrival in Beijing of Mikhail Gorbachev, the first Soviet leader to be invited to China since the Sino-Soviet rift. His visit explained the presence of the world's press in Beijing. The students revered Gorbachecv as the progressive leader of a socialist state who was introducing into his country the very reforms that they were demanding for China. They believed that while he was present in China the government would not dare to crush their demonstration
Bibliography
"Four Modernizations Era." Four Modernizations Era. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Feb. 2014. <http://http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/graph/9confour.htm
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