Then there was still the threat of Chiang Kaishek, with his 200,000 troops and much of Chinas gold reserves in Taiwan, would try to invade mainland china. But the greatest problem was the one that, over the last fifty years, had defeated the Manchu dynasty, sun Yatsen and Yuan Shikai, the warlords and the Guomindang: the problem of holding china together as a united country.
The first project of the communists after coming to power was to reorganise the government of china. They began by grouping the country’s eighteen provinces into six regions. In each region they set up a series of councils to run each subdivision of the region, from the provinces down to counties, cities, districts and towns. At each of these levels there was also a communist’s party committee which made sure that the councils put communist policies into effect. The people’s liberation army, the five million soldiers who had one the civil war shared tasks of government with the councils that ran the six regions into which china had been divided. They began to rebuild railway lines, bridges and ports.
Also the communist made many changes for the rights of woman in April 1950 the new government introduced a marriage law. This ended any discrimation against woman such as arranged marriages, the marriage of children, the killing of unwanted girl babies, and bigamy these were all made illegal. Husbands and wives now jointly owned the family property, where before it was all owned by the husband, divorced by mutual consent was introduced. And a law in February 1951 gave expectant mothers maternity benefit of wages for two months after the birth of the child.
The next change the peoples republic of china embark upon was the system of land ownership, before that the communist had already started to divide areas between peasants in Yanan. They did the same in the ‘liberation areas’ which came under there control during the civil war; by 1949 they had given away many parts of the country. 30 June 1950 an agrarian reform law this moved along the process of land reform. Between 1950 and 1952 about 40 per cent of all cultivated land was taken away from the landlords a ‘rich’ peasant, and were given to approximately 300 million peasants. The agrarian reform law of 1950 did not live up to all the peasant’s expectations, after receiving their land, peasants were normally resentfully disappointed when they realised they not no equipment to work with, neither the money to buy any equipment. Many of them joined mutual aid teams of about ten families which then worked together on the land sharing their animals and equipment.
The new communists government try to overcome china’s economy problems by at first taking away major banks, the railway network, and about a third of heavy industrys and made in to state property. The profits from these ventures were paid immediately into the state treasury, giving the government roughly two thirds of its yearly income.
