Acolyte Of Death
30th May 2003, 15:45
A HISTORY OF CHINESE COMMUNISM
INTRODUCTION
China. The Orient. The land of mysteries. The exotic Far East. Even the mention of the name evokes such memories and ideas. It evokes the colours red and gold, and great cities with populations larger than developing countries. It spurs the mind and the senses. But what is China now? What monumental change came upon this nation, this group of ethnically diverse and culturally rich and fecund peoples? The nature of the Chinese cultural drama propelled the rise of authoritarian structures in the past, from the ancient rules of the old emperors in thousands of years B.C., through the steam-driven industrial might of the nineteenth century, through the tumultuous twentieth, and beyond. So did the rise of communism in China signal a paradigm shift in thinking and society, or has the ethos essentially remained unchanged? The story begins in the nineteenth century, when China witnessed the rise of Western Imperialism, and its impact upon the Chinese people.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The years of the 1800's saw the rise of imperialism as the European Powers - nations like Britain, France, and Germany - competed for control of the territories in Africa, South America, and Asia, and the rich resources and labour power available there. It was the British who came to China.
They sought to siphon off the gold and silver of China, the wealth acquired from Europe through trade over the centuries. Yet the Chinese were going through a period of isolation, and refused to trade except in only a limited form - the Westerners had nothing that appealed to the Chinese, except for one thing. Opium. This drug, made from the seeds of poppy plants, was the most addictive substance of its day, and it was smoked or inhaled.
From the moment that the British and Dutch started to trade opium at their ports, the drug became wildly popular in China. Its addictive effects, however, crippled the Chinese, spawning great millions of people helplessly addicted to opium, left weak and suffering from withdrawal. This drastic effect became known and despised in the courts of the mandarins and the emperor, as peasants could no longer pay for their land dues, which had to be paid in silver. Therefore they did the logical thing: they outlawed the selling of opium.
Yet still it came into China, through illegal smuggling. Hence the problem was to be resolved by force. China sent military troops to order the merchants to turn over their stocks of opium, which were then promptly burnt. The British would have none of this, though, and in response, sent their own fleet to attack the Chinese and force a settlement. The Chinese troops, having long isolated their borders and resisted foreign science, were armed with poorer weaponry, and though they outnumbered the British forces, were beaten. The First Opium War 1839-42 led to the Treaty of Nanking, which required the Chinese to pay $21 million for the costs of the war, in addition to the costs of the opium destroyed, and ceded Hong Kong to Britain. It also allowed foreign 'spheres of control' to be introduced in China - essentially regions in which large sections of land were given over to the free-trade from western nations. Lastly it created tariffs - taxes - for foreign imports.
This literal partitioning and humiliation by 'foreign devils' led to exacerbated and widespread resentment of foreigners, eventually leading up to popular discontent and rebellion. In no other peasant rebellion was this shown as clearly as in the Taiping Rebellion.
The Taiping Rebellion was a series of mostly-peasant-led rebellions against European imperialism. It lasted over a decade, from 1851-64, and millions of peasants lives were lost. However, they were defeated and suppressed by an increasingly harsh and inefficient Manchu government, which signaled the decline of a dynasty. Peasant rebellion, warlordism, foreign invasion, and increasingly extravagant and inefficient government all were signs of the decay of the Ming Dynasty in the late 1800s. An unexpected side effect of the influence of Western culture and foreign imperialism was the rise of Chinese nationalism and the growth of the ideas of republicanism and reform amongst the educated intellectuals of China.
Seeing the might of the Westerners and the in the shadows of the defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese war of 1849-95, the literati and intellectuals, the Western-educated individuals, proposed the idea of self-strengthening or reform, intended to industrialize and educate China; propelling it to advance through machinery and the establishment of urban factories. These intellectuals received but little recognition in the government - when it was proposed to the Empress Dowager that China should build a modern navy she turned down the offer to build a luxury ship for herself. Yet it was they who launched the Reform Movement, which eventually led to the One Hundred Days' Reform.
This Reform Movement proposed forty reforms in the way things were done, and one in government, but not long after they began the Empress Dowager ordered the arrest of the leaders of the Reform, on the grounds that they were plotting a coup of the government.
Not long afterwards the nation was again struck by a wave of peasant rebellions led by the group known as the Society of the Harmonious Fist or the Boxers for short. These were anti-foreign Chinese people whose main targets were the missionaries and merchants who were seen as foreign invaders. They were secretly supported by the Empress Dowager, and in the near 1900's the Boxers attacked and killed Chinese Christians and foreigners. Despite their early victories as a major peasant force, the Boxers were brutally suppressed by the Western Powers. Eventually, though, the reform movement gained such momentum and pressure that the Empress Dowager was forced to accept a change in government (i.e. the establishment of a constitution and parliament) - at least on paper.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Eventually, pending the death of the Empress Dowager in the early 20th century, the Ming Dynasty collapsed and with it, the old dynastic rule. The new government that rose was the Republican Chinese government, led by the Republican revolutionary leader Sun Yat-Sen. This government lasted only a short time - after the Revolution of 1911 to the Communist victory in 1949. Sun Yat-Sen created the Guomindang or Nationalist Party, and appointed Chiang Kai-Shek as the leader of the newly-created Nationalist Army. A year into his term, Sun Yat-Sen retreated from the scene and a man named Yuan Shih-k'ai, who tried to create a new dynasty with himself as the emperor. A year afterward he died, and the country plunged into new chaos as rival warlords competed for control and power.
In the early 1920s Sun Yat-Sen tried to unify china again and resurrect the Guomindang, attempting to rally the warlords to his cause, but after his death in 1925 before his plan to go North to neutralize the warlords, could be fulfilled. Chiang Kai-Shek, then the leader of the Guomindang, attempted to fulfill this plan with the aid of the newly-formed Chinese Communist Party, which was only formed in 1921, but due to the influx of Western influences, thrived and grew. Yet when Chiang Kai-Shek came to power in China after the death of Yuan Shih-k'ai in 1925, he felt that it was time to cease relations with the Communists and he ordered a purge in which his nationalist forces attempted to massacre all Communists. They nearly succeeded, but they failed to eliminate all the Communists in the fields who were busy attempting to win over the support of the peasants. One of such Communists was Mao Tse-Tung.
Mao Tse-Tung quickly rose to power in the rural areas, due to his strong leadership and prior high standing in the Communist Party. When the Nationalists purged the urban Communists it was Mao who first took the few remaining Communists in the rural areas, and fled northward, from Southeast China to the Northwest Shaanxi province. This large movement north would be known as the Long March. At the beginning of the trek northward 90,000 Communists set out with their families. At the end 7,000 remained. Though the casualties were grave, the survivors were a hardened, trained force of soldiers and individuals whose camaraderie was unshakable, due to the hardships they had suffered. Yet the purpose of the Long March had been fulfilled - the Communist army's theatre of operations moved from Southern China, to the North.
In 1931, Japan, China's modernized neighbour to the east, then further encroached on China from its captured area of Machuria, initiating the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45. The Communists and the Nationalists forged a tenuous alliance and together, they defeated the rival warlords, as well as the Japanese. Yet the two great political blocs were not friendly with one another, and they both felt that they were dangers to one another. The Nationalists, when they allied with the Communists, hoped to undermine the Communist Party from within.
After the war old tensions rose again and China plunged once more into civil war. Initially the Nationalists seemed to be winning, their advances into the north were originally successful, but the People's Liberation Army (now the name of the Communist forces) changed their methods of fighting to pulling surrendering territory and harassing the Guomindang troops. Due to internal problems such as floods, droughts, and government inefficiencies, and low troop morale later in the war, the Communists began to advance, recapturing lost territories. The PLA had trained soldiers with high morale, recruited from the peasantry whom Mao urged the soldiers to respect, and it was not long before Communist forces began advancing into Southern China, Manchuria, and the Northeast near Beijing. In January 1949, Beijing was captured by the Communists, the government having already fled and the military either disbanded or retreated.
COMMUNIST CHINA
After the Revolution of 1949 the Communists soon proved and demonstrated their efficiency and skills at administration. Immediately several campaigns were launched to extensively rebuild and re-establish China, which was by now, exhausted by civil war. The Communists launched programs to rebuild roads, dams, bridges, and other public access structures that were damaged by war. They also created a new one-party government, dominated by three main branches: the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the People's Liberation Army, and the Chinese Communist Party.
One of the first goals of the new government was transforming China into a modernized, industrial socialist power and one of the ways to that was through education. Thus a strong campaign utilizing every resource at their hands, was launched to teach the people ideological values and technical skills, in anticipation of the economic reforms to occur in the future. Children and adults alike were taught via extensive propaganda to value communist ideals over traditional ones such as arranged marriages for women, foot binding, large-family values, and the old spiritualities.
After having re-established their economic and industrial base, the leaders of the new Communist China set out to modernize China soviet-style, namely, through a programme known as the First Five Year Plan (1953-1957), whose aim was to achieve high economic growth with an emphasis on heavy industry and production at the expense of agriculture. Farming, though, was increased in efficiency by a process of collectivization - the creation of worker's cooperatives - in rural areas. This plan was successful in that it managed to increase production of textiles, machinery, coal, oil, steel, and numerous other industries; with an average of 19% per annum between those years, and an average agricultural increase of 4%. Even though the government did not spend much money on agriculture, it nonetheless managed to thrive due to the early efficiency of the new system.
In 1958 China called upon its people to make a massive, concerted effort in to propel China into true communism even faster. This vast project was called the Great Leap Forward, and it called for the organization of worker's collectives into vast, productive communes ranging from 20,000 - 30,000 workers each; a massive work campaign to produce massive amounts of steel through the building of 'backyard furnaces'; and to build a complex system of dams and irrigation to maximize agricultural revenues. This was to be done through a tremendous propaganda campaign, and the slogan "put politics in command" gained true significance. Initially the project was a success, as in the same year, industrial output increased by about 55%, and farming produced higher-than-usual amounts of food. Sadly, the years following the Great Leap Forward proved to be an economic and social disaster for China, due to adverse weather conditions and the resistance of peasants to the large commune-ization plan.
Due to severe crop failures China experienced severe famines in those years, and agricultural production dropped to unsustainable levels. Millions of peasants died. Furthermore most of the steel produced by the 'backyard furnaces' proved to be unusable and worthless. The country faced severe economic problems, thus in 1960 the government re-organised policy to encourage agriculture before production and modernization. Central planning was to be reduced from the levels experienced during the Great Leap Forward, and material rewards were to be emphasized, rather than political and revolutionary rewards.
In the early 1960's Mao began to feel what he believed to be capitalist or rightist sentiments in the Communist party, and that the Party had lost track of its true purpose - bringing socialism and strengthening the common people - the peasants and workers. Coupled with this was the belief that the revolutionary 'spirit' of the people - especially the youth - was waning. Thus, in 1962 he launched a campaign against these rightist elements within the Party, calling upon the students and young people especially, to rise up and 'bombard the Party' and 'learn from the PLA'. Thus began the period of time known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasted from May 1966 until August 1969, and whose effects continued until Mao Tse-Tung's death in September 1976. During this period the students formed the organizations known as the Red Guards, whose loyalty was to that of Chairman Mao and whose goals were to root out and persecute 'rightism'. Intellectuals and those branded dissidents were often rounded up, forced to confess to 'crimes' and then sent to distant work farms. This led to the death of tens of millions of people. However it did manage to effectively change the Party, though not quite in the manner that Chairman Mao pictured. After his death in 1976, and the arrest of the group called the Gang of Four - the ensuing political crisis led to the rise of the moderate leader Deng Xiaoping, and the end of the true 'Communist' period.
Deng Xiaoping was concerned primarily with modernizing China economically, and while he did not much care for restricting the powers of the Party (as demonstrated in the Tiananmen Square massacre), he did encourage the process of de-communization, and ordained it that peasants would be able to tend to their private plots of land and sell their product to the government. His economic reforms marked the end of Chinese socialism, and while the Communist Party still controls the government, the economy as we know it today is essentially capitalistic.
Throughout its thousands of years of history China has been marked by periods of dynastic cycles. Preceding every dynasty is a period of fighting and warlordism. When the dynasty has been established it builds public buildings for peasants, rebuilds roads, and constructs flood-control structures such as dams. Later in its rule, perhaps a few hundred years after, the government becomes corrupt and inefficient, eventually falling prey to foreign invaders and peasant revolts. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th China was experiencing such a period dynastic decline - marked by foreign 'invaders' in the form of Western imperialists, peasant rebellions, bandits in the countryside, and later, rival warlords. When Mao Tse-Tung came to power in 1949 he made his speech from the Forbidden City, essentially proclaiming to China, his claim to the 'mandate of heaven'. After the new government was established it demonstrated its early efficiency by establishing flood-control and bringing order to the countryside. The new 'dynasty' effectively has established control of the country, and was clearly demonstrating it.
Yet the past dynasties of China were different in that they were isolated, and each dynasty had no fundamental difference in government than the one that preceded it. This came to an end when the modern Chinese government came to power, as it was run by a socialist economic model and had access to modern technologies and ideas. In this age of information the distinctions between the nations are no longer restricted by geography, and in an age of globalisation, the old patterns of dynasty no longer apply as mass-market and corporate forces change government patterns forever. The Chinese dynastic cycles effectively ended in 1949, and the future of China, remains to be said.
(Edited by Acolyte Of Death at 3:49 pm on May 30, 2003)
(Edited by Acolyte Of Death at 3:53 pm on May 30, 2003)
INTRODUCTION
China. The Orient. The land of mysteries. The exotic Far East. Even the mention of the name evokes such memories and ideas. It evokes the colours red and gold, and great cities with populations larger than developing countries. It spurs the mind and the senses. But what is China now? What monumental change came upon this nation, this group of ethnically diverse and culturally rich and fecund peoples? The nature of the Chinese cultural drama propelled the rise of authoritarian structures in the past, from the ancient rules of the old emperors in thousands of years B.C., through the steam-driven industrial might of the nineteenth century, through the tumultuous twentieth, and beyond. So did the rise of communism in China signal a paradigm shift in thinking and society, or has the ethos essentially remained unchanged? The story begins in the nineteenth century, when China witnessed the rise of Western Imperialism, and its impact upon the Chinese people.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The years of the 1800's saw the rise of imperialism as the European Powers - nations like Britain, France, and Germany - competed for control of the territories in Africa, South America, and Asia, and the rich resources and labour power available there. It was the British who came to China.
They sought to siphon off the gold and silver of China, the wealth acquired from Europe through trade over the centuries. Yet the Chinese were going through a period of isolation, and refused to trade except in only a limited form - the Westerners had nothing that appealed to the Chinese, except for one thing. Opium. This drug, made from the seeds of poppy plants, was the most addictive substance of its day, and it was smoked or inhaled.
From the moment that the British and Dutch started to trade opium at their ports, the drug became wildly popular in China. Its addictive effects, however, crippled the Chinese, spawning great millions of people helplessly addicted to opium, left weak and suffering from withdrawal. This drastic effect became known and despised in the courts of the mandarins and the emperor, as peasants could no longer pay for their land dues, which had to be paid in silver. Therefore they did the logical thing: they outlawed the selling of opium.
Yet still it came into China, through illegal smuggling. Hence the problem was to be resolved by force. China sent military troops to order the merchants to turn over their stocks of opium, which were then promptly burnt. The British would have none of this, though, and in response, sent their own fleet to attack the Chinese and force a settlement. The Chinese troops, having long isolated their borders and resisted foreign science, were armed with poorer weaponry, and though they outnumbered the British forces, were beaten. The First Opium War 1839-42 led to the Treaty of Nanking, which required the Chinese to pay $21 million for the costs of the war, in addition to the costs of the opium destroyed, and ceded Hong Kong to Britain. It also allowed foreign 'spheres of control' to be introduced in China - essentially regions in which large sections of land were given over to the free-trade from western nations. Lastly it created tariffs - taxes - for foreign imports.
This literal partitioning and humiliation by 'foreign devils' led to exacerbated and widespread resentment of foreigners, eventually leading up to popular discontent and rebellion. In no other peasant rebellion was this shown as clearly as in the Taiping Rebellion.
The Taiping Rebellion was a series of mostly-peasant-led rebellions against European imperialism. It lasted over a decade, from 1851-64, and millions of peasants lives were lost. However, they were defeated and suppressed by an increasingly harsh and inefficient Manchu government, which signaled the decline of a dynasty. Peasant rebellion, warlordism, foreign invasion, and increasingly extravagant and inefficient government all were signs of the decay of the Ming Dynasty in the late 1800s. An unexpected side effect of the influence of Western culture and foreign imperialism was the rise of Chinese nationalism and the growth of the ideas of republicanism and reform amongst the educated intellectuals of China.
Seeing the might of the Westerners and the in the shadows of the defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese war of 1849-95, the literati and intellectuals, the Western-educated individuals, proposed the idea of self-strengthening or reform, intended to industrialize and educate China; propelling it to advance through machinery and the establishment of urban factories. These intellectuals received but little recognition in the government - when it was proposed to the Empress Dowager that China should build a modern navy she turned down the offer to build a luxury ship for herself. Yet it was they who launched the Reform Movement, which eventually led to the One Hundred Days' Reform.
This Reform Movement proposed forty reforms in the way things were done, and one in government, but not long after they began the Empress Dowager ordered the arrest of the leaders of the Reform, on the grounds that they were plotting a coup of the government.
Not long afterwards the nation was again struck by a wave of peasant rebellions led by the group known as the Society of the Harmonious Fist or the Boxers for short. These were anti-foreign Chinese people whose main targets were the missionaries and merchants who were seen as foreign invaders. They were secretly supported by the Empress Dowager, and in the near 1900's the Boxers attacked and killed Chinese Christians and foreigners. Despite their early victories as a major peasant force, the Boxers were brutally suppressed by the Western Powers. Eventually, though, the reform movement gained such momentum and pressure that the Empress Dowager was forced to accept a change in government (i.e. the establishment of a constitution and parliament) - at least on paper.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Eventually, pending the death of the Empress Dowager in the early 20th century, the Ming Dynasty collapsed and with it, the old dynastic rule. The new government that rose was the Republican Chinese government, led by the Republican revolutionary leader Sun Yat-Sen. This government lasted only a short time - after the Revolution of 1911 to the Communist victory in 1949. Sun Yat-Sen created the Guomindang or Nationalist Party, and appointed Chiang Kai-Shek as the leader of the newly-created Nationalist Army. A year into his term, Sun Yat-Sen retreated from the scene and a man named Yuan Shih-k'ai, who tried to create a new dynasty with himself as the emperor. A year afterward he died, and the country plunged into new chaos as rival warlords competed for control and power.
In the early 1920s Sun Yat-Sen tried to unify china again and resurrect the Guomindang, attempting to rally the warlords to his cause, but after his death in 1925 before his plan to go North to neutralize the warlords, could be fulfilled. Chiang Kai-Shek, then the leader of the Guomindang, attempted to fulfill this plan with the aid of the newly-formed Chinese Communist Party, which was only formed in 1921, but due to the influx of Western influences, thrived and grew. Yet when Chiang Kai-Shek came to power in China after the death of Yuan Shih-k'ai in 1925, he felt that it was time to cease relations with the Communists and he ordered a purge in which his nationalist forces attempted to massacre all Communists. They nearly succeeded, but they failed to eliminate all the Communists in the fields who were busy attempting to win over the support of the peasants. One of such Communists was Mao Tse-Tung.
Mao Tse-Tung quickly rose to power in the rural areas, due to his strong leadership and prior high standing in the Communist Party. When the Nationalists purged the urban Communists it was Mao who first took the few remaining Communists in the rural areas, and fled northward, from Southeast China to the Northwest Shaanxi province. This large movement north would be known as the Long March. At the beginning of the trek northward 90,000 Communists set out with their families. At the end 7,000 remained. Though the casualties were grave, the survivors were a hardened, trained force of soldiers and individuals whose camaraderie was unshakable, due to the hardships they had suffered. Yet the purpose of the Long March had been fulfilled - the Communist army's theatre of operations moved from Southern China, to the North.
In 1931, Japan, China's modernized neighbour to the east, then further encroached on China from its captured area of Machuria, initiating the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45. The Communists and the Nationalists forged a tenuous alliance and together, they defeated the rival warlords, as well as the Japanese. Yet the two great political blocs were not friendly with one another, and they both felt that they were dangers to one another. The Nationalists, when they allied with the Communists, hoped to undermine the Communist Party from within.
After the war old tensions rose again and China plunged once more into civil war. Initially the Nationalists seemed to be winning, their advances into the north were originally successful, but the People's Liberation Army (now the name of the Communist forces) changed their methods of fighting to pulling surrendering territory and harassing the Guomindang troops. Due to internal problems such as floods, droughts, and government inefficiencies, and low troop morale later in the war, the Communists began to advance, recapturing lost territories. The PLA had trained soldiers with high morale, recruited from the peasantry whom Mao urged the soldiers to respect, and it was not long before Communist forces began advancing into Southern China, Manchuria, and the Northeast near Beijing. In January 1949, Beijing was captured by the Communists, the government having already fled and the military either disbanded or retreated.
COMMUNIST CHINA
After the Revolution of 1949 the Communists soon proved and demonstrated their efficiency and skills at administration. Immediately several campaigns were launched to extensively rebuild and re-establish China, which was by now, exhausted by civil war. The Communists launched programs to rebuild roads, dams, bridges, and other public access structures that were damaged by war. They also created a new one-party government, dominated by three main branches: the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the People's Liberation Army, and the Chinese Communist Party.
One of the first goals of the new government was transforming China into a modernized, industrial socialist power and one of the ways to that was through education. Thus a strong campaign utilizing every resource at their hands, was launched to teach the people ideological values and technical skills, in anticipation of the economic reforms to occur in the future. Children and adults alike were taught via extensive propaganda to value communist ideals over traditional ones such as arranged marriages for women, foot binding, large-family values, and the old spiritualities.
After having re-established their economic and industrial base, the leaders of the new Communist China set out to modernize China soviet-style, namely, through a programme known as the First Five Year Plan (1953-1957), whose aim was to achieve high economic growth with an emphasis on heavy industry and production at the expense of agriculture. Farming, though, was increased in efficiency by a process of collectivization - the creation of worker's cooperatives - in rural areas. This plan was successful in that it managed to increase production of textiles, machinery, coal, oil, steel, and numerous other industries; with an average of 19% per annum between those years, and an average agricultural increase of 4%. Even though the government did not spend much money on agriculture, it nonetheless managed to thrive due to the early efficiency of the new system.
In 1958 China called upon its people to make a massive, concerted effort in to propel China into true communism even faster. This vast project was called the Great Leap Forward, and it called for the organization of worker's collectives into vast, productive communes ranging from 20,000 - 30,000 workers each; a massive work campaign to produce massive amounts of steel through the building of 'backyard furnaces'; and to build a complex system of dams and irrigation to maximize agricultural revenues. This was to be done through a tremendous propaganda campaign, and the slogan "put politics in command" gained true significance. Initially the project was a success, as in the same year, industrial output increased by about 55%, and farming produced higher-than-usual amounts of food. Sadly, the years following the Great Leap Forward proved to be an economic and social disaster for China, due to adverse weather conditions and the resistance of peasants to the large commune-ization plan.
Due to severe crop failures China experienced severe famines in those years, and agricultural production dropped to unsustainable levels. Millions of peasants died. Furthermore most of the steel produced by the 'backyard furnaces' proved to be unusable and worthless. The country faced severe economic problems, thus in 1960 the government re-organised policy to encourage agriculture before production and modernization. Central planning was to be reduced from the levels experienced during the Great Leap Forward, and material rewards were to be emphasized, rather than political and revolutionary rewards.
In the early 1960's Mao began to feel what he believed to be capitalist or rightist sentiments in the Communist party, and that the Party had lost track of its true purpose - bringing socialism and strengthening the common people - the peasants and workers. Coupled with this was the belief that the revolutionary 'spirit' of the people - especially the youth - was waning. Thus, in 1962 he launched a campaign against these rightist elements within the Party, calling upon the students and young people especially, to rise up and 'bombard the Party' and 'learn from the PLA'. Thus began the period of time known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasted from May 1966 until August 1969, and whose effects continued until Mao Tse-Tung's death in September 1976. During this period the students formed the organizations known as the Red Guards, whose loyalty was to that of Chairman Mao and whose goals were to root out and persecute 'rightism'. Intellectuals and those branded dissidents were often rounded up, forced to confess to 'crimes' and then sent to distant work farms. This led to the death of tens of millions of people. However it did manage to effectively change the Party, though not quite in the manner that Chairman Mao pictured. After his death in 1976, and the arrest of the group called the Gang of Four - the ensuing political crisis led to the rise of the moderate leader Deng Xiaoping, and the end of the true 'Communist' period.
Deng Xiaoping was concerned primarily with modernizing China economically, and while he did not much care for restricting the powers of the Party (as demonstrated in the Tiananmen Square massacre), he did encourage the process of de-communization, and ordained it that peasants would be able to tend to their private plots of land and sell their product to the government. His economic reforms marked the end of Chinese socialism, and while the Communist Party still controls the government, the economy as we know it today is essentially capitalistic.
Throughout its thousands of years of history China has been marked by periods of dynastic cycles. Preceding every dynasty is a period of fighting and warlordism. When the dynasty has been established it builds public buildings for peasants, rebuilds roads, and constructs flood-control structures such as dams. Later in its rule, perhaps a few hundred years after, the government becomes corrupt and inefficient, eventually falling prey to foreign invaders and peasant revolts. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th China was experiencing such a period dynastic decline - marked by foreign 'invaders' in the form of Western imperialists, peasant rebellions, bandits in the countryside, and later, rival warlords. When Mao Tse-Tung came to power in 1949 he made his speech from the Forbidden City, essentially proclaiming to China, his claim to the 'mandate of heaven'. After the new government was established it demonstrated its early efficiency by establishing flood-control and bringing order to the countryside. The new 'dynasty' effectively has established control of the country, and was clearly demonstrating it.
Yet the past dynasties of China were different in that they were isolated, and each dynasty had no fundamental difference in government than the one that preceded it. This came to an end when the modern Chinese government came to power, as it was run by a socialist economic model and had access to modern technologies and ideas. In this age of information the distinctions between the nations are no longer restricted by geography, and in an age of globalisation, the old patterns of dynasty no longer apply as mass-market and corporate forces change government patterns forever. The Chinese dynastic cycles effectively ended in 1949, and the future of China, remains to be said.
(Edited by Acolyte Of Death at 3:49 pm on May 30, 2003)
(Edited by Acolyte Of Death at 3:53 pm on May 30, 2003)