Mao - his social and economic policies and his decline and re-establishment of power

International Baccalaureate History

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC POLICIES

Social Reform

The CCP was keen to tackle problems of organised crime and banditry and approached this decisively, punishing and often executing major criminals but treating prostitutes and drug addicts as victims and providing them with rehabilitation programmes.
On coming to power, the CCP launched a massive drive to increase literacy and expand educational provision.
In 1949, only 24 million children attended primary education and 1.27 million were in secondary education. By 1953 this had increased to 51 million and 3.13 million respectively.
However, even by the mid-50s illiteracy rates remained very high, with perhaps as much as 80% of the population unable to read and write.
During the 1950s the CCP relied on a lot of help from the USSR in the form of Russians teaching in Chinese schools and Chinese people being trained in Russian universities.
The CCP did try to improve the position of women in society. In 1950, the Marriage Law banned arranged and child marriages and polygamy.
Women were also given the right to divorce and the right to own property. This led to a huge increase in divorce, with 1.3 million divorce petitions filled in 1953.
However, changing men’s attitudes, particularly in rural areas, proved very difficult and women continued to be treated as inferiors by many men, receiving lower pay and continuing to marry outside their native villages, as was the custom.

Socialist Transition

First Five Year Plans (1953-57)

The First Five Year Plan ended the National Capitalist phase and saw, by February 1956, the nationalisation of all private industries and businesses in China.
Given the backing that the GMD had received from the USA, Mao decided that the PRC must ‘lean to one side’ in international relations and look, despite receiving very little help from Stalin in the past, to the Russian comrades for friendship.
Furthermore it was natural, given their lack of experience in industrial planning, for the CCP to turn to the UUSR for advice and help in building a socialist economy.

Results

It completed the process of nationalism of industry. On the eve of the Five Year Plan, 20% of heavy industry and 60% of light industry had still been under private ownership.
It boosted urbanisation. China’s urban population increased from 57 million (1949) to 100 million (1957).
There were important infrastructure improvements such as the Yangzi River Rail and Road Bridge linking north and south China.
Over the course of the Five Year Plan, heavy industrial output nearly trebled and light industrial output rose by 70%. Overall targets were exceeded by 20%.
The $300 million lent by the USSR represented only 3% of total investment under the Five Year Plan, so the Chinese government had to raise the money to fund the Plan from its own population.
Consequently, agriculture was squeezed to pay for heavy industrial expansion; the state set grain prices low, to produce a large profit which could be invested in industry.
Agricultural investment was low as 90% of state investment was in industry. This is one reason for the relatively slow growth in agricultural output (just 3.8% p.a.)

Collectivisation

Aware of the disasters that had accompanied Stalin’s collectivisation of Russian agriculture in the 1930s and drawing on their considerable experience of working with the peasants, the CCP adopted a gradualist approach to introducing socialism into the countryside.
The CCP leadership was convinced that collectivisation was essential for increasing agricultural efficiency as well as for fulfilling their ideological aims.
However, from the early 1950s onwards, there were quarrels over the pace at which the PRC was moving towards full collectivisation.

Results

The CCP achieved far greater control over the countryside than any previous regime. Indeed this is perfectly summed up by the historian, John King Fairbank, who described this as “a modern serfdom under party control’.
From 1953, the state became sole buyer and seller of grain and peasants were obliged to sell fixed quotas of grain to the state.
The gradual introduction of collectivisation in China meant that it was achieved much more peacefully than had been the case in Russia.
The differences in wealth between the peasants in the early 1950s were relatively small so that most peasants did not feel they would lose out by pooling their resources.
Collectivisation was achieved without major disruption to the rural economy and 1957 saw a 5% increase in agricultural output.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign

In 1957 the CCP briefly lifted censorship and encouraged intellectuals to voice criticism of how the party was working. This was known as the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” and was very much Mao’s initiative.
After a slow start, a torrent of criticism was unleashed in which many claimed that the CCP had become a privileged caste, alienated from the masses.
The movement spread to the universities as students called for multi-party elections and a Democracy Wall was created at Beijing University, with student and lecturers pinning up posters.
Within six weeks the ...

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The Hundred Flowers Campaign

In 1957 the CCP briefly lifted censorship and encouraged intellectuals to voice criticism of how the party was working. This was known as the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” and was very much Mao’s initiative.
After a slow start, a torrent of criticism was unleashed in which many claimed that the CCP had become a privileged caste, alienated from the masses.
The movement spread to the universities as students called for multi-party elections and a Democracy Wall was created at Beijing University, with student and lecturers pinning up posters.
Within six weeks the CCP leadership, alarmed at the way its authority was being undermined, decided to bring the campaign to a halt.
A purge of intellectuals and other critics then followed, known as the Anti-Rightist Campaign and some 500,000 people were forced to undergo labour reform or were sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants.

Reasons for Hundred Flowers

It is possible that Mao saw the Hundred Flowers as a form of rectification. Opening up the CCP to criticism would keep it pure and prevent it from developing into a privileged élite.
Indeed on one hand it is possible that Mao saw the Hundred Flowers as a safety valve, designed to let off steam so that grievances did not accumulate to exploding point.
If this is the case, then Mao massively misjudged the likely scale of the condemnation that would ensue and had not foreseen that there would be widespread calls for the end to the CCP’s monopoly of power.
On the other hand, the Hundred Flowers can be viewed as a trap set by Mao to flush out critics, as many intellectuals suspected.
Nevertheless the Hundred Flowers coincided with rapid industrialisation and the CCP leadership was perhaps seeking to encourage intellectuals as their talents would be invaluable in this process.

The Great Leap Forward (1958)

Mao had growing reservations about the Soviet-style First Five Year Plan and indeed in May 1956 Mao delivered an important speech known as “On the Ten Great Relationships”, in which he outlined a set of economic priorities which were fundamentally at odds with the Five Year Plan and which the Great Leap Forward would be based on.

Reasons

Under the Five Year Plan, with its massive emphasis on heavy industry, light industry and heavy had been neglected; Mao wanted china to develop these two components simultaneously.
Since 1956, material incentives in the form of pay differentials for skilled and unskilled workers had reappeared. This clashed with the Marxist idea of rewarding each according to his needs.
The Five Year Plan focused on capital-intensive projects but the PRC was short of capital to invest in industry, particularly as agricultural productivity was rising only slowly.
Mao was keen to change the nature of China’s economic planning and development because the First Five Year Plan was Russian in inspiration and direction and Mao wanted to assert China’s independence and do things his own way.
By 1957 Mao was impatient to accelerate the speed of economic growth. The rapid collectivisation of 1956-7 encouraged Mao to believe that willpower and mobilisation of the masses could deliver huge advances in industry and agriculture.
Mao was worried that the CCP may be losing its revolutionary spirit and that the CCP and government officials were becoming a self-interested élite. He aimed to reduce the influence of the central planning ministries in Beijing and increase the influence of provincial CCP agencies. He wanted to revive the “Yanan spirit” and mobilise both the Party and the masses to create a modern, socialist economy.

Results- Industry

Overall China’s Gross National Income increased by 8% in 1959 but fell by 30% in 1960.
600,000 backyard furnaces were built in 1958 and steel production more or less reached the target laid down by the government.
But the steel produced by the backyard furnaces was of such poor quality, that most of it could not be used. The programme was therefore abandoned in 1959. The government had not taken into account factors such as the availability of coal, iron ore and transport.
In spite of the failure of the backyard furnace scheme, the GLF marked the beginning of rural industrialisation, which became a very important feature of China’s economy in the long-term.
The communes had considerable success in manufacturing agricultural tools, the production of chemical fertilisers and in uranium mining (which helped accelerate China’s atomic programme).
The communes also contributed to widespread irrigation and hydroelectric projects. This model of labour-intensive development was to have considerable appeal to Third World countries.

Results- Agriculture

The impact of the Great Leap Forward was much more disastrous on the countryside.
The 1958 harvest was good, yielding 200 million tons of grain. However the government published the inflated figure of 260 million tons and set wildly unrealistic targets for 1959.
The 1959 and 1960 harvests were poor, yielding 170 and 144 million tons respectively.
China experienced a catastrophic famine: the death rate rose steeply in 1959 (from 1.08% to 1.46% of the population) and then hugely in 1960 to 2.54% of the population. The rate remained high in 1961 (1.7%) and in these three years, in excess of 20 million people died in the famine.

Why did it fail?

CCP officials were unable to deal with the huge challenges posed by the GLF. In particular, local cadres were totally unprepared for managing the vast size of the communes. The GLF took off in 1958 with very little prior planning.
The intensive use of labour could not, contrary to Mao’s philosophy, compensate for the lack of capital investment in technologically advanced processes such as steel production, hence the failure of the “backyard furnace” programme.
Flawed agricultural reforms, derived from the ideas of the Russian agronomist, Lysenko, were imposed on the peasants. These included close planting, deep ploughing and a campaign against the “Four Pests” (rats, sparrows, flies and mosquitoes). The sparrow population was all but wiped out, which allowed an explosion of caterpillars, which devastated crops.
Grain production fell partly because peasants were heavily involved in industrial projects and land reclamation. After the initial enthusiasm of 1958 wore off, many became exhausted by the demands being made of them. In the autumn of 1958, about 90 million people temporarily abandoned their normal occupations to get involved in steel production.
The withdrawal of material incentives contributed to falling levels of agricultural and industrial output. The peasants disliked the huge sixe of the communes and the regimented lifestyle and resented the loss of their private plots. In industry, the ending of higher wages for skilled workers and greater output, demotivated factory workers.
China suffered abnormally bad weather in 1959-61, leading to severe draught in the North-east and flooding in the South. 60% of China’s arable land was affected.
Although the harvests were poor in 1959-60, they were not disastrous that a famine should have ensued. Famine was more the product of the CCP’s refusal to admit to failure. Officials at both local and national level claimed a record harvest in 1959 (supposedly 282 million tons) and so the state took 28% of the peasants’ grain (as opposed to just 17% in 1957)
Most of the blame for the failure by official to report honestly must be laid at Mao’s door. He had, by 1958, created a climate of fear in which almost no-one, even within the circle of top CCP leaders, dared criticise his policies.
To make matters worse, after having begun to accept that there were serious problems with the GLF, Mao responded to severe criticism at the Central Committee meeting at Lushan in July 1959 by reaffirming his faith in the GLF thus continuing git into late 1960 thus intensifying the famine.

DECLINE AND RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF POWER

Mao retires to the ‘second front’

Since the early 1950s Mao had been planning to step back from the day-to-day running of the government and Party and, as he put it, retire to the ‘second front’ where he could concentrate on strategic thinking and planning, leaving younger colleagues to take over the reins.
In accordance with this, Mao gave up his position as PRC Chairman in 1959, before the CCP officially declared the Great Leap to have failed.
However the disasters of the GLF forced Mao further into the political background than he had anticipated, being respected but not consulted.

Infighting and the Socialist Education Movement

From 1962, serious divisions emerged between radical Communists (including Mao himself) and the ‘pragmatists’ or modernisers who supported Liu and Deng’s more ideologically flexible economic policies.
Mao became alarmed by the direction of Deng and Liu’s economic reforms. Mao saw Liu’s ‘household responsibility’ system as being tantamount to abandoning socialism and he was horrified to see it extended so that by the summer of 1962, 20% of arable land was being farmed individually.
From 1962 onwards, Mao sought to restore his influence over the CCP as he was desperate to prevent the Party becoming, in his eyes, increasingly ‘revisionist’ and going further down the ‘capitalist road’.
There Mao typically turned to mass mobilisation and rectification in the shape of the Socialist Education Movement.
This movement was an attempt to re-educate the masses politically and bring about a fundamental change in the way the Chinese masses saw the world so that they took on new socialist attitudes.
Mao intended that CCP officials undergo self-criticism and subject themselves to criticism by the masses.
However Deng and Liu obstructed Mao’s attempt to mobilise the masses, issuing directions which fundamentally altered the Socialist Education Movement; rather than mass mobilisation, the CCP leadership organised work teams to go to schools and factories in order to educate the people.
It would take Mao until to get a mass campaign off the ground; this became known as the ‘Cultural Revolution’.

The Cultural Revolution (1966-76)

Mao was able to rely on the unswerving support of Lin Bao, the Defence Minister from 1959, who encouraged a cult of Mao within the PLA.
In 1963 he published Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’, which became daily study for the PLA and the population, as well as being school set texts.
Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and a group of radicals known as the Shanghai Forum, promoted the idea of a total transformation of the arts in China, so that all pre-1949 art and literature and all western culture were rejected.

Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution, which caused the greatest disorder in modern Chinese history.
Although Mao intended a huge upheaval, it seems clear that events got out of the Party’s control, even for Mao’s liking, and by 1969 the worst of the disruption was halted by action by the CCP and the PLA.
However, officially the Cultural Revolution did not end until Mao’s death in 1976.

Motives

He sought to reassert his authority over the CCP, ending Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping’s influence.
He was desperate to stop the CCP’s movement towards developing an élite of officials and managers.
He wanted to change cultural values and sought to attack ‘bourgeois’, western and traditional Chinese values. He sought to remould the mentality and outlook of the Chinese people.
Mao intended to restore the CCP’s revolutionary zeal. Mao was looking to provide China’s young generation with a revolutionary challenge. They were China’s future but they had not been through the crucible of the Long March and the Civil War.

Chronology

From May 1966 here was growing unrest in the universities, encouraged by visiting members of the Cultural Revolution Group. Students and high school pupils in Beijing began to organise themselves into Red Guard units, dedicated to carrying out Mao’s will.
In July 1966 Mao staged his ‘Great Swim’ in the Yangzi River in order to demonstrate his virility and that he was ‘back’.
In August 1966 Mao publicly expressed his support for the Red Guard movement in Beijing, leading to units being set up all over China. Mao called on all students to seek out and destroy all those who were taking the “capitalist road” within the CCP.
The resulting wave of revolutionary enthusiasm was supposedly spontaneous but was orchestrated to a considerable degree from above.
In August 1966 the first huge Maoist rally of over 1 million Red Guards took place in Tiananmen Square. The PLA took over the railway network on behalf of the radical Maoists and young people were given free transport to Beijing.
There they attended hysterical mass rallies before returning to their homes to seek out those in authority who were taking the capitalist road.
Deng and Liu were dismissed in October 1966. Liu died in prison in 1969. Wide spread purges were carried out by the Red Guards, with Mao urging them to attack ‘the Four Olds’ (old thought, old culture, old practices, old customs).
The Red Guards launched violent attacks on ‘bad elements’ – many CCP officials, teachers, intellectuals and former bourgeoisie were subjected to terrifying psychological and physical assaults.
Although the Cultural Revolution originated with organised activism, once started it proved very difficult to control. Schools and universities closed down.
Many moderate Maoists insisted on the restoration of order. However despite Zhou Enlai’s call for the Red Guards to stop violence in September 1967, it continued and the PLA was sent in to restore order which was achieved by late 1968.

Why Mao retreated from radicalism

The purges and violence probably went much further than Mao had intended and the emergence of the Shanghai People’s Commune threatened the CCP’s monopoly of power in China.
The Cultural Revolution was causing chaos, at a time when the CCP leadership was increasingly worried by the prospect of war with the USSR.
A number of military commanders, but not Lin Bao, became worried that the purges of the Cultural Revolution might be extended.

Results

The defeat of Ling Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and the “revisionists”, though Deng would be rehabilitated in 1973 and helped shape China’s economic policies from then on.
The cult of Mao reached its height. In 1869, a new constitution defined ‘Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought’ as the guiding line of the CCP.
About 500,000 people died with the main victims consisting of intellectuals and officials, not peasants as in the Great Leap Forward. The prison camp system (longai) expanded.
The period 1968-70 saw the massive transfer of 20 to 30 million urban inhabitants to the countryside.
“May 7th Schools” were set up to re-educate Party officials each year Maoist thought and by workings in the fields.
Education, particularly higher education, was disastrously disrupted for several years afterwards. During the Cultural Revolution admission to university was based on “political consciousness” rather than academic qualifications.
Chinese art and literature became very sterile as Jiang Qing imposed strict controls on what could be displayed, performed and published. The Red Guards destroyed a lot of ancient Chinese art, including Buddhist temples.
The People’s Republic became increasingly isolated internationally. Westerners were attacked in China and in August 1967 the British embassy was sacked by a mob.
The economy was not severely damaged by the Cultural Revolution. There was some disruption to industry but by 1970 industrial output had risen to record levels. However much of the state’s investment in 1964-71 was in the “Third Front”, military-industrial development in North-West and South-West China and this was a waste of resources.
Mao saw the Cultural Revolution as over by 1970, having defeated his revisionist opponents. However, the period of Maoist indoctrination and domination, which the Cultural Revolution represents, did not end until 1976 (Mao’s death).
The Cultural Revolution can be viewed as the escalation of certain features present in the People’s Republic since 1949 – namely, public denunciation, struggle sessions and mass mobilisation.
It had essentially been an urban phenomenon and the countryside had suffered much less disruption than the towns.