How successful was the leadership of Mao Tse-Tung between 1949 to 1976? Address economic, societal, and cultural aspects of Mao's time in leadership.

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Michaël                                                                                                                             January 2013.

Lebrun.

How successful was the leadership of Mao Tse-Tung between 1949 to 1976?

Address economic, societal, and cultural aspects of Mao's time in leadership.

            Between 1919 to 1949, China had endured a lot of conflicts. The biggest of all being the 1946-1949 civil war which ended the three-decade period of tension. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Tse-Tung came to power in 1949, China's economy and people held the scars of the conflictual years. The rivalry had opposed the CCP and the nationalists (the Kuomintang), which were lead by Sun Yatzen until 1925 and by Chiang Kai Shek until the faction's dissolution. The civil war saw Mao and his CCP rising to victory, before his declaration of China being "The People's Republic of China" in 1949. From 1949, Mao's ultimate goal was to turn China into a super-power, perhaps into the world's most sovereign nation. To attain his goal, Mao established numerous policies. His programs and policies encompassed three areas: the economy, the culture, and the society. The policies have been judged to be everything from effective and useful to futile and crude. This essay will examine which policies were effective and which were not, and what was it that ultimately lead to the end of Maoism.

            Once the civil war was over and China was declared as the People's Republic of China, instability in society was high. There was also confusion and discontentment within the Chinese people, while the hope for a brighter future was obviously there too. For this reason, Mao's strategy was that of bringing security and hope to the Chinese people. In return, Mao would certainly gain the trust and the support of his people. Mao wanted to win the support of the majority of his population, and that majority consisted of peasants. No moral concern would stop him. Everything behind his policies was thus strategically planned to achieve this aim. In 1949, Mao launched the Organic Law which divided China into six categories. Each of these were regulated by officials. Force was used to achieve a certain level of stability. His second movement was the Agrarian Reform Law. Officials were sent to each villages to implement the law. Their job was to equally share the land between the peasants, and in the process beat, imprison, or execute landlords. Their aliby was that the landlords had been overpricing the lands. But of course, this was done only to gain the support of the peasants. As Mao was getting more popular with his land reforms, a new problem arose. Food availability was not keeping up with China's rapid increase of population (546 million in 1950 to 581 million in 1953). By 1957, 90 percent of the peasants belonged to cooperatives, meaning that they no longer exclusively owned their land. During the fifties, literacy greatly increased as party workers taught peasants to read and write. Mao's biggest social reform of 1950 was the one that gave women equal rights to men. Before this reform, Chinese women had the same status as most women around the world. They were far less valued and far less respected than their masculine compatriot. China had arranged marriages and women were epicene creatures designed to arise lust and provide pleasure. However, Mao's "marriage law" policy drastically changed that. This social policy allowed women to vote, to own land, and to choose their matrimonial partner, while arranged marriages were made illegal. In 1951, Mao brought into beingness an influencal economic program. The five anti-movement policy was designed to benefit the economy by preventing issues such as tax evasion and fraud.

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            This economic reform was followed by the 1953 People's Republic of China's first five-year plan. The movement which ended in 1957, targeted industrial increase within three specific areas: coal, steel, and chemical products. To most, China's first five-year plan was an unquestionable success, as production aims were not only reached but surpassed. The five-year plan period testified a 9 percent increase in China's economic growth rate as it created an abundance of job opportunities but also gave birth to a railway system which would move goods and raw material all around the ...

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