People's China: Mao Zedong
The communists win the civil war, and the most populous country on earth is given over for a quarter-century to the will of one man.
On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaims the People's Republic of China in Beijing; the Kuomintang, having lost the civil war, withdraws to Taiwan. Land is divided among the peasants, then taken back into communes. The Great Leap Forward of 1958–1961, an attempt to overtake the industrial West in three years, ends in a famine in which tens of millions die; estimates range from fifteen to forty-five. In 1966 Mao raises the Cultural Revolution against his own party, and for ten years the country is shaken by purges, the wrecking of schools and temples and the exile of the young to the villages. Mao dies in 1976. The country he leaves is united, nuclear and destitute; in two years it will begin to change.
Sources
Documents of the period
- the documents of the Chinese Communist Party and the PRC government, 1949–1976 — the proclamation of the republic, the communes and the Cultural Revolution
Scholarship
- studies of twentieth-century China — the estimates of the dead in the famine of 1958–1961
Basis: documents and evidence.