Political - early period

Question 1

Early period - general political relaxation

Answer 1

• Mao Zedong: ‘Our constitution is of a new socialist type, different from any of the bourgeois type.’
• political system:
• organic Law of the Central People’s Government and Common Programme
• eight ‘democratic parties’ would govern alongside CCP
• 11/24 ministers were non-Communists , ‘a joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes’,

Question 2

Early period - political tightening

Answer 2

• 1952 – political parties other than CCP banned
• 1954 – formal constitution & first National People’s Congress held
• Elections for party officials & administrators held in villages, localities and regions … but only one party could stand for election
• democratic centralism – true democracy in a Communist party lay in the obedience of the members to the authority and instructions of the leaders
• 4.5 million members = 1% of population
• the military:
• close ties to the Party and State; PLA supervised by Military Affairs Committee (under Politburo) minor parties were only allowed inon condition that they did not diverge from the CCP

Question 3

Early period - military

Answer 3

• the PLA:
• reunification campaigns – military brought border regions & remote rural areas under control, including Xinjiang, Guangdong & Tibet by 1951
• China divided into six regions administered by four officials – at least half were officers in the PLA
• until 1954, China remained under quasi-military administration
• terror tactics & mass killings:
• Shanghai – 28,000 bandits and criminals killed

Guangzhou – 130,000 rounded up; half killed

• workers were bound to their work unit for life. Workers not complying with policy could have their pay docked, incentives withheld or living conditions downgraded. In

- July 1 9 5 1 , Regulations Governing the Urban Population required that all city dwellers register with branches of the Public Security Bureau, starting a process that would lead to the removal of any right to free movement

Question 4

Early period - Three antis (sanfan)

Answer 4

• Three Antis (sanfan):
• 1951 – campaign against ‘corruption, waste and bureaucratism WITHIN bureaucracy and party members
• against capitalist tendencies
• 1 million expelled

• closest scrutiny of public servants who had worked for GMD

iii. Maoised the governmental bureaucracy by replacing them with Communists

“revealed the growing impatience of the new regime” Xiaobing Li

vi. 200,000-300,000 suicides

Question 5

Five antis (wufan)

Answer 5

• 1952 – targeted

• bribery
• tax evasion
• theft of state property
• cheating on government contracts
• stealing economic information
• 1952-53 – most factories became joint private-state ventures
• denunciations and executions:
• mobilisation of ordinary people as they reported on each other
• mass meetings of workers and Party activists

Shanghai, 99 per centof businessmen were held to be guilty of at least one of the ‘five poisons’

• 450,000 businesses investigated, 340,000 found guilty
• encouraged to relinquish ownership to state

Question 6

Gao gang affair

Answer 6

• late 1952 – Mao called Gao Gang to Beijing and appointed him head of the State Planning Commission; Gao then plotted to become Vice-Chairman, unseating Liu
• Gao Gang (CCP leader in Manchuria) & Rao Rashi (CCP leader in Shandong) identified as misusing their authority
• 24 December 1953 – at a Politburo meeting, Mao berated Gao for creating divisions within the Party
• 31 March 1954 – Gao & Rao were purged from the Party while Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping both received promotions
• showed Mao’s emerging Imperial leadership style – prepared to play off comrades against each other to strengthen authority
• standing squarely in the line of allpowerfulfirst emperors - Fenby

Question 7

Culture to the masses

Answer 7

A new currency was issued. The written language was simplified by the dropping of 1,055 characters - 515 were accepted as standard forms and 196 were added.

Question 8

Hundred Flowers Campaign

Answer 8

• • Mao Zedong: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.’
• • encourage greater freedom of expression amongst intellectuals: to make the Party to more responsive to popular sentiment & to express social grievances through discourse
• reluctance among intellectuals:
• most intellectuals & Party leaders (apart from Mao & Zhou) were unenthusiastic about unleashing criticism
• 27 February 1957 – Mao’s speech to Supreme State Conference – ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’ – class conflict had ceased, but there would be other contradictions that could be resolved peacefully by the Maoist approach of unity-criticism-unity
• Mao made a three-week train ride through eastern China to ease concerns
• mass line on a mass scale – stage-managed meetings with peasants & workers

Question 9

Hundred Flowers Campaign - reaction

Answer 9

• ‘poisonous weeds’:
• Mao shocked, assuming criticism would be constructive
• 8 June 1957 – editorial in the People’s Daily signalled the end of the movement – denunciations no longer tolerated
• ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions’ revised: distinction between ‘non-antagonistic’ and ‘antagonistic’ contradictions
• ‘poisonous’ – ideas contrary to socialism, divisive, critical of the democratic dictatorship, democratic centralism & the CCP

• Anti-Rightist campaign:

• Deng Xiaoping appointed to direct Anti-Rightist campaign
• Tens of thousands of academic and students put through denunciation and self-criticism meetings; institutions required to expose a quota of five percent of staff as Rightists: 300,000 – 400,000 ‘Rightists’ sent for ‘re-education through labour’
• People whose partners were deemed Rightists were urged to ‘draw a line’
• 40% of GMD Revolutionary Committee & Democratic League parties found guilty of following an ‘anti-Communist, anti-people, anti-Socialist bourgeois line’
• Liu told anIndian delegation that ‘no matter whether the Party’s line is correct or mistaken, the Party must safeguard its unity. . . A Party split is more damaging than a defeat to the revolution.

Question 10

100 flowers begin to bloom

Answer 10

• flowers begin to bloom:
• Mao criticised for his ‘arbitrary and reckless character’
• Communists accused of betraying their socialist ideals
• In some cities, workers went on strike & student riots
• The number ofstrikes grew - Shanghai saw eighty-six in 1956.
• in Shanghai where protests in the spring of 1957 involved nearly30,000 workers at 587 enterprises, with more than 200 walkouts and 100 production go-slows.

Question 11

100 flowers reasons

Answer 11

• critique of Mao’s high tide, pushed back in leadership
• Mao moves to the ‘second line’, broader policy questions, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to take ‘first line’, day to day running
• direct references to Mao Zedong Thought as the CCP guiding doctrine dropped from constitution in September 1956
• Nikita Krushev had denounced Stalin 25 February 1956, Mao had similiar personality cult
• popular uprisings against Communist regimes in Hungary and Poland 1956

Question 12

100 flowers - Phillip Short

Answer 12

” He underestimated the volume adn bitterness of the criticisms, and the cadres’ ability to withstand them… It became a trap not for the few but the many - for the hundreds of thousands of loyal citizens that had take the CCP at its word”

Question 13

National People’s Congress

Answer 13

• In 1953 elections were conducted for a new legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC). This assembly was considered to be the supreme decision-making body in China, however a range of factors led to it becoming politically redundant.
• A complex four-stage electoral system (voters elected a local congress, which elected a county congress, which elected a provincial congress, which in turn elected the NPC) meant that the NPC itself was barely representative. Low levels of literacy and political consciousness, as well as CCP’s domination such as its control of nomination lists and voting procedures, both impacted on election results.
• would only meet occasionally. The real business of government was conducted by a state council of ministers, chief among them being Mao Zedong (shown here meeting a delegation from the British Labour Party in 1954).
• Enormous power was vested in Mao, who was not only the chairman-president of the People’s Republic itself, but also a Politburo member, chairman of the CCP and chairman of the Central Military Commission. Not only was ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ the official state ideology, Mao himself had effectively become the head of state, head of foreign affairs, commander-in-chief of the armed forces and CCP party chief.