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Evolution of the Chinese Republic
1.0 INTRODUCTION
The Chinese people have shared a common culture which is possibly more ancient than any other civilization in the world. The imperial dynastic system of government, which continued for centuries, was established as early as 221 BC. Although specific dynasties were overturned, the dynastic system survived. China was even ruled at times by foreign invaders, such as the Mongols during the Yuan Dynasty, from AD 1279 to 1368, and the Manchus during the Ch'ing Dynasty, from AD 1644 to 1911, but the foreigners were largely absorbed into the culture they governed.
After the 1911 revolution, the dynastic system was overthrown and a weak republican form of government existed until 1949. In that year, after a long civil war, the People's Republic of China (PRC), with a Communist government, was proclaimed. This government and the ruling Communist party have controlled China ever since, without a single popular election! Although the dynastic system has disappeared, the People's Republic occupies essentially the same territory and governs the same people. If anything, the culture and power of China seem stronger in the late 20th century than at almost any other period in history. Under the People's Republic, China's role in world economic and political affairs has grown increasingly more important.
2.0 THE OPIUM WARS
The first intervention of European powers into China started in the early 18th century. The long period of peace and prosperity under the Ching and earlier dynasties had some adverse effects on Chinese society. There was a shortage of land, resulting from an increase in the population from 100 million to 300 million (30 crores) at the end of the 18th century. Decadence and corruption spread in the imperial court. There was a decline of the Manchu military spirit, and the Ch'ing military organization deteriorated. The long and illustrious reign of the emperor Ch'ien-lung was marred by the first of many serious rebellions in the Ch'ing era, the White Lotus Rebellion from 1796 to 1804. It was not put down for ten years, and China entered the 19th century rocked by revolt. More devastating were the incursions of Western powers, which shook the foundation of the empire.
Confucian China's attempts to exclude pernicious foreign ideas resulted in highly restricted trade. Prior to the 1830s, there was but one port open to Western merchants, Guangzhou (Canton) and but one commodity that the Chinese would accept in trade, silver. British and American merchants, anxious to address what they perceived as a trade imbalance, determined to import the one product that the Chinese did not themselves have but which an ever-increasing number of them wanted: opium.
2.1 The first opium war
British traders saw an opportunity from the conquest of Indian Bengal which had a large harvest of opium. The sale and smoking of the drug was banned by Emperor Yongzheng in 1729, but 100 years later there was still strong demand and the British were exploiting it. By 1836, 30,000 opium chests were arriving in China each year from India. Jardine, Matheson and Company was responsible for a quarter of those. By flouting the trade ban on opium, Britain found a way to increase its earnings from China.
But British law-breaking had not gone unnoticed and in 1839 Emperor Daoguang declared a war on drugs. A series of raids were ordered on the Western traders. The traders in the thirteen factory warehouses were locked in by the Chinese army and forced to surrender. Goods with a value of £2 million were seized, including 42,000 opium pipes and 20,000 chests of opium.
Incensed by the seizures, William Jardine left Canton for London, where he lobbied the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to strike back at China. With opium responsible for a significant part of British India's tax revenue, it didn't take long for the government to send in the navy. In June 1840 the British fleet of 16 warships and 27 transports carrying 4,000 men arrived in the Pearl River Delta, near Humen.
Among them was the Nemesis, a new iron warship armed with a deadly weapon - the Congreve rocket launcher, able to fire exploding rockets up to a distance of two miles. The Chinese were prepared, but their antiquated defences were no match for the British. Their static canons and armada of war junks were destroyed in just five and a half hours.
Over the next two years the British navy travelled up the coast towards Shanghai. Chinese troops, many of whom were addicted to opium, were overwhelmed at every stage. The British bombardments resulted in a considerable loss of life - between 20,000 and 25,000 Chinese were killed. Britain lost just 69 men.
The Chinese Empire was shattered. In August 1842 aboard HMS Cornwallis, near the town of Nanking, the Chinese signed what became known as the "unequal treaty". They agreed to open five ports to foreign trade and pay 21m silver dollars to the British government, as compensation for loss of opium earnings and the cost of war. For the British the highlight of the deal was the acquisition of Hong Kong Island, which would be used as a hub to increase trade in opium with China.
2.2 The second opium war
In the 1850s, the United States and the European powers grew increasingly dissatisfied with both the terms of their treaties with China and the Qing Government's failure to adhere to them. The British forced the issue by attacking the Chinese port cities of Guangzhou and Tianjin in the Second Opium War. Under the most-favored-nation clause contained in the existing treaties, all of the foreign powers operating in China were permitted to seek the same concessions of China that Great Britain achieved by force. As a result, France, Russia, and the United States all signed treaties with China at Tianjin in quick succession in 1858.
These treaties granted the Western powers a number of rights and privileges. The number of treaty ports increased, with new ports opened to Western trade along the Chinese coast, on the islands of Taiwan and Hainan, and along the Yangtze River in the interior. With the opening of the Yangtze River, foreigners also gained full access to the interior, and were free to travel and conduct business or missions anywhere in China. The British demanded the right of Chinese citizens to emigrate on British ships. British (and therefore, French, American and Russian) diplomats were permitted to establish legations and live in Beijing. The agreements reached at Tianjin also set a new, low tariff for imported goods, giving foreign traders an important advantage.
While the British and French used military power to convince China to accept the new treaty agreements, U.S. diplomat John Ward sought, and finally achieved through diplomatic negotiations, an exchange of treaty ratifications in 1859. Under the most-favored-nation clause, the U.S. ratification allowed the other powers to take advantage of the treaty provisions of the Treaty of Tianjin secured by American diplomacy.
The Chinese refusal to ratify the treaty led to an Anglo-French attack on Peking and the burning of the Summer Palace. In 1860 the Chinese signed the Convention of Peking by which they promised to observe the 1858 treaty.
3.0 The Taiping Rebellion
In terms of casualties the Taiping rebellion was one of the worst civil wars in history. More than 20 million - possibly more than 30 million died, and 17 provinces were ravaged by the Taiping Rebellion. This was the most serious of several internal disturbances that took place in China between 1850 and 1873 and that seriously weakened the Ch'ing Dynasty and helped prepare the way for the revolutions of the 20th century.
The leader of the rebellion was Hung Hsiu-ch'uan, an unsuccessful civil-service candidate who came under the influence of fundamentalist Christianity. Thinking of himself as a son of God sent to reform China, he helped found the Association of God Worshippers in about 1846. Preaching that all property should be held by the people, he attracted many followers in Guangxi Province. By January 1851, when the rebellion began, Hung's ranks had swelled from several thousand ragged peasants to more than 1 million disciplined and eager soldiers. They took the city of Nanjing in March 1853 and made it their capital. For several years the rebel armies dominated the Yangtze River valley. They failed, however, to take Shanghai, where the defenders were commanded by an American named Frederick Townsend Ward and the British general known as Chinese Gordon. By 1862 the movement was losing steam, weakened by internal strife and defections. Nanjing fell in July 1864 to the army of Gen.Tseng Kuo-fan, and Hung committed suicide. Sporadic resistance continued for four more years.
4.0 Late 19th Century Revolutionary ideas and organizations
The reforms that were sponsored by the imperial government were too little and too late. A drastic change was necessary. The idea of overthrowing the Manchus was suggested by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao in his concept of hsin min (new people). The message was quickly picked up by the more radical leaders who were already leaning toward revolution.
One such leader was Sun Yat-sen, who is now revered as the father of modern China by Nationalists and Communists alike. Born into a peasant family near Canton, the traditional stronghold of anti-Manchu rebels, Sun followed a traditional Chinese path during his early years. He was educated in Hawaii, converted to Christianity, and had a short-lived medical career before switching to politics and attempting to propose a reform program to Li Hung-chang in 1894. After forming a secret revolutionary society and plotting an unsuccessful uprising in Canton in 1894, Sun began a long period of exile outside China. He gained wide recognition as a revolutionary leader in 1896, when his arrest in the Chinese legation in London and subsequent rescue were reported sensationally in newspaper articles.
In 1905, in Japan, he brought together several revolutionary groups and formed the Revolutionary Alliance Society. Its program consisted of the now famous Three People's Principles: nationalism, freeing all China from foreign control; democracy, overthrowing the Manchus and introducing a democratic political system; and people's livelihood. Although Sun himself could not live in China, members of the alliance infiltrated many social organizations there. The revolutionary spirit that had been developed by Sun became especially high among students' and soldiers' groups.
4.1 The Boxer Rebellion
In the summer of 1900 members of a secret society roamed northeastern China in bands, killing Europeans and Americans and destroying buildings owned by foreigners. They called themselves I-ho ch'uan, or "Righteous and Harmonious Fists." They practiced boxing skills that they believed made them impervious to bullets. To Westerners they became known as the Boxers, and their uprising was called the Boxer Rebellion.
Most Boxers were peasants or urban thugs from northern China who resented the growing influence of Westerners in their land. They organized themselves in 1898, and in the same year the Chinese government - then ruled by the Ch'ing Dynasty - secretly allied with the Boxers to oppose such outsiders as Christian missionaries and European businessmen. The Boxers failed to drive foreigners out of China, but they set the stage for the successful Chinese revolutionary movement of the early 20th century.
Foreigners had entered China during an era of imperialism. In the late 1800s Great Britain and other European nations, the United States, Russia, and Japan scrambled for spheres of influence there. In some cases they seized Chinese territories, but usually they only sought the riches of trade and commercial enterprise. At the same time, Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries tried to convert the Chinese to Christianity. These outsiders were resented and feared by the Chinese, who saw Western religion and business practices as a threat to their traditional ways.
By May of 1900, Boxers were wandering the countryside and attacking Western missionaries and Chinese converts to Christianity. In June an expeditionary force, made up of Russian, British, German, French, American, and Japanese troops, was organized to proceed to Peking (now Beijing), put down the rebellion, and protect Western nationals.
The Chinese dowager empress Tz'u-hsi, the aunt of Emperor Kuang-hsu, ordered her troops to block the advance of this expedition. The foreigners were turned back. Meanwhile, Boxers were rampaging in Peking, burning down churches and the houses of Westerners, and killing Chinese Christians. Foreign troops then seized Chinese coastal forts to insure access to Peking. Enraged, the dowager empress ordered the death of all foreigners in China. The German minister to China was assassinated, and Boxer rebels began an eight-week attack on the walled foreign compound in Peking.
In response, the allied foreign governments sent some 19,000 soldiers to Peking, capturing the city on Aug. 14, 1900. The invaders looted the city and routed the Boxers, while the empress and her court fled to the north. By the time the rebellion ended, at least 250 foreigners had been killed. It took a year for the parties to the conflict to agree on a settlement, which was entitled the Peace of Peking. This protocol, which was signed in September 1901, was dictated by the Western powers and Japan in such a way as to humiliate China. Heavy fines were levied against the Chinese government, and existing commercial treaties were amended in favor of the Western powers. The foreign coastal defenses were dismantled.
The failure of the Boxer Rebellion to eject the West and the humiliation of the Chinese by the terms of the Peace of Peking generated more support for nationalist revolutionaries. In 1911 the Ch'ing Dynasty collapsed. Revolutionaries led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen then took over the Chinese government, ending more than 2,000 years of monarchy.
4.2 The Revolution of 1911
In the industrial city of Wuhan, a soldiers' group with only a loose connection to Sun's alliance rose in rebellion in the early morning of Oct. 10, 1911 (since celebrated as Double Ten, the tenth day of the tenth month). The Manchu governor and his commander fled, and a Chinese commander, Li Yuan-hung, was pressured into taking over the leadership. By early December all of the central, southern, and northwestern provinces had declared independence. Sun Yat-sen, who was in the United States during the revolution, returned and was chosen head of the provisional government of the Republic of China in Nanjing.
The Manchu court quickly summoned Yuan Shih-kai, the former commander of the reformed Northern Army. Personally ambitious and politically shrewd, Yuan carried out negotiations with both the Manchu court and the revolutionaries. Yuan was able to persuade the Manchus to abdicate peacefully in return for the safety of the imperial family. On Feb. 12, 1912, the regent of the 6-year-old emperor formally announced the abdication. The Manchu rule in China ended after 267 years, and with it the 2,000-year-old imperial system.
5.0 THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA (1912-1949)
Sun Yat-sen - known as the founder of modern China - was born on Nov. 12, 1866, in Guangdong Province and attended several schools, including one in Honolulu, Hawaii, before transferring to a college of medicine in Hong Kong. Graduating in 1892, Sun almost immediately abandoned medicine for politics. His role in an unsuccessful uprising in Canton in 1895 prompted Sun to begin an exile that lasted for 16 years. Sun used this time to travel widely in Japan, Europe, and the United States, enlisting sympathy and raising money for his republican cause. Sun returned to China in 1911 after a successful rebellion in Wuhan inspired uprisings in other provinces. As leader of the Kuomintang, or Nationalist party, Sun was elected provisional president of the newly declared republic but was forced to resign in 1912.
In 1913 his disagreements with government policies led Sun to organize a second revolution. Failing to regain power, Sun left once again for Japan, where he organized a separate government. Sun returned to China and attempted to set up a new government in 1917 and 1921 before successfully installing himself as generalissimo of a new regime in 1923.
Sun increasingly relied on aid from the Soviet Union, and in 1924 he reorganized the Kuomintang on the model of the Soviet Communist party. Sun also founded the Whampoa Military Academy and appointed Chiang Kai-shek as its president. Sun summarized his policies in the Three Principles of the People - nationalism, democracy, and socialism. He died of cancer in Peking on March 12, 1925. Sun's tomb in Nanking is now a national shrine.
5.1 The May Fourth Movement
After World War I, the Chinese felt betrayed. Anger and frustration erupted in demonstrations on May 4, 1919, in Beijing. Joined by workers and merchants, the movement spread to major cities. The Chinese representative at Versailles refused to endorse the peace treaty, but its provisions remained unchanged. Disillusioned with the West, many Chinese looked elsewhere for help.
The May Fourth Movement, which grew out of the student uprising, attacked Confucianism, initiated a vernacular style of writing, and promoted science. Scholars of international stature, such as John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, were invited to lecture. Numerous magazines were published to stimulate new thoughts. Toward the end of the movement's existence, a split occurred among its leaders. Some, like Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Li Ta-chao, were beginning to be influenced by the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which contrasted sharply with the failure of the 1911 Revolution in China to change the social order and improve conditions. By 1920, people associated with the Comintern (Communist International) were disseminating literature in China and helping to start Communist groups, including one led by Mao Zedong. A meeting at Shanghai in 1921 was actually the first party congress of the Communist Party of China (CCP).
The CCP was so small that the Soviet Union looked elsewhere for a viable political ally. A Comintern agent, Adolph Joffe, was sent to China to approach Sun Yat-sen, who had failed to obtain assistance from Great Britain or the United States. The period of Sino-Soviet collaboration began with the Sun-Joffe Declaration of Jan. 26, 1923. The KMT was recognized by the Soviet Union, and the Communists were admitted as members. With Soviet aid, the KMT army was built up. A young officer, Chiang Kai-shek, was sent to Moscow for training. Upon returning, he was put in charge of the Whampoa Military Academy, established to train soldiers to fight the warlords, who controlled much of China. Zhou Enlai (also Chou En-lai) of the CCP was deputy director of the academy's political department.
Sun Yat-sen, whose power base was in the south, had planned to send an expedition against the northern warlords, but he died before it could get under way. Chiang Kai-shek, who succeeded him in the KMT leadership, began the northern expedition in July 1926. The Nationalist army met little resistance and by April 1927 had reached the lower Yangtze. Meanwhile, Chiang, claiming to be a sincere follower of Sun Yat-sen, had broken with the left-wing elements of the KMT. After the Nationalist forces had taken Shanghai, a Communist-led general strike was suppressed with bloodshed. Following suppressions in other cities, Chiang set up his own government at Nanjing on April 18, 1927. He professed friendship with the Soviet Union, but by July 1927 he was expelling Communists from the KMT. Some left-wingers left for the Soviet Union.
The northern expedition was resumed, and in 1928 Chiang took Peking. China was formally unified. Nationalist China was recognized by the Western powers and supported by loans from foreign banks.
5.2 The Nationalist era (1928-1937)
The Nationalist period began with high hopes and much promise. However, mainly due to the japanese aggression and internal corruption Chiang neglected the land reform needed to improve the lives of the peasants.
Driven from the cities, the Communists concentrated on organizing the peasants in the countryside. On Nov. 1, 1931, they proclaimed the establishment of the Chinese Soviet Republic in the southeastern province of Jiangxi, with Mao Zedong as chairman. Here the first units of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army were formed. While conducting guerrilla warfare in these regions, the soldiers carried out an agrarian revolution that was based on Mao's premise that the best way to win the conflict was to isolate the cities by gaining control of the countryside and the food supply.
A military man by temperament and training, Chiang sought to eliminate the Communists by force. He defined his anti-Communist drive as "internal pacification before resistance to external attack," and he gave it more importance than opposition to the increasingly aggressive Japanese. With arms and military advisers from Nazi Germany, Chiang carried out a series of "extermination campaigns" that killed about a million people between 1930 to 1934. Chiang's fifth campaign, involving over half a million troops, almost annihilated the Communists. Faced with the dilemma of being totally destroyed in Jiangxi or attempting an almost impossible escape, the Communists decided to risk the escape. On Oct. 15, 1934, they broke through the tight KMT siege. Over 1,00,000 men and women set out on the Long March of about 6,000 miles (9,600 kilometers) through China's most rugged terrain to find a new base in the northwest.
In the meantime, the Japanese had made steady inroads into China. The Mukden Incident of 1931, through which Mukden was occupied by the Japanese, was initiated by Japanese officers stationed along the South Manchurian Railway. This was followed by the occupation of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. By the mid-1930s the Japanese had seized Inner Mongolia and parts of northeastern China and had created the North China Autonomous Region with no resistance from the Nationalists. Anti-Japanese sentiment mounted in China, but Chiang ignored it and in 1936 launched yet another extermination campaign against the Communists in Shaanxi. Chiang was forced to give up the anti-Communist drive when his troops mutinied and arrested him as he arrived in Xi'an in December 1936 to plan strategy. He was released after he agreed to form a united front with the CCP against the Japanese, who were making steady inroads into China.
In China, World War II broke out on July 7, 1937, with a seemingly insignificant little battle between Chinese and Japanese troops near Peking, called the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Within a few days, the Japanese had occupied Peking, and the fighting spread rapidly. The war in China fell into three stages. The first (1937-1939) was characterized by the phenomenally rapid Japanese occupation of most of China's east coast, including such major cities as Shanghai, Nanjing, and Canton. The Nationalist government moved to the interior, ultimately to Chongqing in Sichuan, and the Japanese established puppet governments in Peking in 1937 and in Nanjing in 1940. The second stage (1939-1943) was a period of waiting, as Chiang blockaded the Communists in the northwest (despite the united front) and waited for help from the United States, which had declared war on Japan in 1941.
In the final stage (1944-1945), the United States provided massive assistance to Nationalist China, but the Chongqing government, weakened by inflation, impoverishment of the middle class, and low troop morale was unable to take full advantage of it. Feuds among the KMT generals and between Chiang and his United States military adviser, General Joseph Stilwell, further hampered the KMT.
When Japanese defeat became a certainty in the spring of 1945, the Communists seemed in a better position to take over from the Japanese garrisons than the KMT, which was far away in the rear of the formation. A United States airlift of KMT troops enabled them to occupy many cities, but the countryside stayed with the Communists.
After the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, the Allied war effort moved to the east. The Soviet Union joined the war against Japan at the end of July. On August 6 and 9 the United States dropped the world's first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On Aug. 14, 1945, the Japanese surrendered. In China, however, civil war raged over who should take charge of the Japanese arms and equipment. At the end of August an agreement was reached in Chongqing between a CCP delegation and the KMT, but the truce was brief.
In January 1946 a cease-fire was negotiated by United States General George C. Marshall. The Nationalist government returned to Nanjing, and China was recognized by the new United Nations as one of the five great powers. The United States supplied the Chiang government with an additional $2 billion ($1.5 billion had been spent for the war). Although the KMT's dominance in weapons and supplies was enormous, it was kept under guard in the cities, while the Communists held the surrounding countryside. As inflation soared, both civilians and the military became demoralized. The CCP, sensing the national mood, proposed a coalition government. The KMT refused, and fighting erupted again.
The short and decisive civil war that followed was resolved in two main places: Manchuria and the Huai River area. Despite a massive airlift of KMT forces by the United States, Manchuria was lost in October 1948 after 3,00,000 KMT forces surrendered to the CCP. By the end of 1948 the KMT had lost over half a million men, more than two thirds of whom had defected. In April 1949 the Communists moved south of the Yangtze.
After the fall of Nanjing and Shanghai, KMT resistance evaporated. By the autumn, the Communists had taken all mainland territories except Tibet. Chiang Kai-shek and a number of his associates fled to the island of Taiwan, where they set up what they claimed was the rightful government of China.
6.0 THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION
The Chinese Communist party is today the primary political force in China. Unlike parties in Western democracies, it is a tightly organized movement that controls and leads society at all levels. The party sets policy and controls its execution through government officials who are also party members. The effect is to make the government an organ of the party.
At the time of its founding in 1921, the Chinese Communist party focused on organizing urban workers, but it achieved only limited success in this effort. Orthodox Marxism expected the Communist Revolution to begin among industrial workers. However, Karl Marx had developed his theories based upon highly industrialized economies, and the industrial sector in China was small and relatively primitive. It was Mao Zedong who adapted Marxist theory to the conditions of an underdeveloped, primarily agricultural society. Although Mao's successors downgraded some of his more radical ideas, Marxism-Leninism as it was interpreted by Mao - is still officially designated as the guiding philosophy that is behind both the party and the government.
The Chinese Communist party is organized as a hierarchy, with power concentrated at the top. Above the local units, or cells, is a pyramid-like structure of party congresses and committees at various levels, culminating in the National Party Congress. The national congress is supposed to meet every five years, though this has not always been the case. When it is not in session, direction of the party is in the hands of a Central Committee of about 200 members, which is elected by the congress. The Central Committee, in turn, elects the Political Bureau, which in 1982 consisted of 25 full members and three alternates. It is within the Political Bureau and its elite Standing Committee that power is concentrated and the highest level decisions of state are made. There is also a secretariat that carries on the day-to-day business of the party.
Theoretically, party membership is open to anyone over 18 who accepts the party program and is willing to work actively in one of its organizations. Members are expected to abide by the party's discipline and to serve as model workers. The backbone of the party consists of full-time paid workers known as cadres (Chinese, ganbu). The term cadre is also used for public officials holding responsible positions who may or may not be members of the party.
7.0 THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
On Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The CCP hailed its takeover of China as a people's victory over and liberation from imperial domination (especially that of the United States) and the oppressive KMT regime. The Red Army was renamed the People's Liberation Army. During the early days of the People's Republic, the troops were restrained, foreign-educated Chinese returned to help the country, and most local administrators remained in office.
The first Communist government, the People's Consultative Council, included non-Communists among its 662 members. However, in the top committee, 31 out of 56 seats were occupied by Communists, and the constitution of 1954 drastically curtailed the role of non-Communists. After 1954, more authority was concentrated in the central government under the State Council. Real power, however, lay with the Communist party, especially the Central Committee, then composed of 94 members. This committee held together the triad of power - army, government, and party. The inner circle of the Central Committee was the 19-member Political Bureau and its seven-member Standing Committee.
Land reforms: One of the first tasks of the Communist government was land reform, redistributing land from landlords to the peasants. The Agrarian Law of 1950 began the nationwide land reform, which was almost completed by the beginning of 1953. It involved killing of landlords on an unprecedented scale (2 million plus!).
Social reforms: Land reform erased the social distinction between landlord and peasant. The new marriage law of 1950 and the campaigns of the early 1950s removed distinctions within the family. Women were given full equality with men in matters of marriage, divorce, and property ownership. Children were encouraged to denounce parents if they failed to support the Communist line.
Thought reform: Believing that the revolution could not be carried on without reform of people, the CCP launched a massive campaign to change China's entire psychology. The Four Olds campaign was launched to eradicate old ideas, habits, customs, and culture. The Three Anti's movement was directed at officials, with the aim of eliminating corruption, waste, and "bureaucratism". The Five Anti's campaign, directed at the remaining businessmen and bourgeoisie, opposed bribery, tax fraud, cheating, and stealing state property and economic information. For Chinese Christians, the Three Selfs movement stressed self-government, self-support, and self-propagation, the object being to separate the churches in China from their parent denominations abroad. Leading churchmen were forced into denouncing religion as cultural imperialism. The idea of cultural imperialism was extended to art and literature, which henceforth were to serve the people, the class struggle, and the revolution.
Economic planning: Along with the reforms of land tenure, society, family, and even thought, the CCP announced the first five-year plan in 1953 to speed up the socialization of China through a planned economy. The plan's aim was to produce maximum returns from agriculture in order to pay for industrialization and Soviet aid. The means chosen was the collectivization of agriculture. Land and farm implements were pooled into cooperatives and later into collective farms, which controlled the production, price, and distribution of products. By May 1956, 90 percent of the farmers were members of cooperatives.
Similarly, 80 percent of heavy industry and 40 percent of light industry were in government hands by October 1952. The government also controlled all the railways and most steamship operations. To speed China's development even more, Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and others, after overcoming some opposition within the leadership, launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958.
7.1 The Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward was designed to overcome the backwardness of China's economy, industry, and technology. It was to be achieved through use of the vast manpower and indomitable spirit of the Chinese. Steel production was to be increased by setting up small-scale "backyard furnaces," and agricultural output was to be raised by combining the collective farms into communes. About 26,000 communes were created by the Communist government, each composed of approximately 5,000 households.
After a year, the leaders admitted that the success of the program had been exaggerated. The steel produced by the backyard furnaces was of low quality, and the quantity fell short of the projected goal. The people's reluctance to join communes was stronger than expected, and the size of the communes had to be reduced. Domestic life in homes, as well as private plots for family use, had to be restored. The effect of the Great Leap Forward on the people and the economy was devastating. Coupled with three straight years of poor harvests, it resulted in a severe food shortage and industrial decline. For the next several years, while lip service was paid to Mao's thought and to Great Leap-type activism, the real power was in more conservative hands.
7.2 The Cultural Revolution
With the failure of the Great Leap Forward, opposition to Mao’s policies started growing.
The Cultural Revolution had its roots in a power struggle between Mao and his supporters, including his wife, Jiang Qing, and Lin Biao - who believed that the initial fervor of the revolution was being lost- and more conservative, bureaucratic elements within the leadership. One point at issue was the educational system, and particularly the fact that urban youth (especially the children of privileged officials) appeared to have a better chance of getting a university education than the children of rural peasants. Mao feared that Chinese society was becoming rigid, and to prevent this he relied for support on the military and on youth.
In the summer of 1966, a group of Beijing high school girls protested against the system of college entrance examinations. The Central Committee acceded to the students' demand by promising a reform and postponing the 1966 enrollment for half a year. Freed from their studies, students demonstrated in Beijing in August, touching off demonstrations of young people in general. Obviously inspired by Mao, youths wearing red armbands and flashing copies of the "little red book" containing Mao's thoughts (Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong), marched through the streets shouting the slogan, "To bypass the Communist party apparatus and force the hierarchy's political foes into submission." These Red Guards, as they were called, were given free railway passes, and they poured into Beijing and other cities in great numbers throughout 1967.
In early 1967 some of the highest ranking leaders, former close revolutionary associates of Mao himself, were criticized and dismissed. Liu Shaoqi, who had been president of the republic, Zhu De, and Deng Xiaoping were among the better known victims. Even Confucius was attacked as having been a hypocritical supporter of the bourgeoisie. Throughout the country, revolutionary committees sprang up, seized power from the local government and party authorities, and harassed - and in some cases attacked - those suspected of being disloyal to Mao's thought.
The disorders reached a climax in July 1967 in the city of Wuhan, when the local military commander tried to rally the people against the radicals and troops had to be sent in to restore order. From that time on, steps were taken to quiet the more disruptive portions of the Cultural Revolution, though it was not until 1968 that society returned to something resembling normality. In March 1969 the government issued a directive to open all schools. The situation was so chaotic, however, that the universities were not reopened until September 1970.
The Cultural Revolution greatly affected the CCP leadership. When the long-postponed ninth congress of the CCP was finally convened in April 1969, two thirds of the old members of the Central Committee were missing. Mao's attempt to maintain a state of permanent revolution had been immensely costly. Years of work and progress were sacrificed: A whole generation of youth went without education; factories and farms lay idle. China fell even further behind the industrialized powers of the world. As the Cultural Revolution died down, Zhou Enlai, who had been premier since the founding of the People's Republic, quietly took control. Deng Xiaoping and other "pragmatic" leaders were reestablished. The party and government relaxed their control over the people and granted certain civil rights in a new constitution adopted in 1975. Mao finally died in 1976.
8.0 POST-MAO CHINA
The year 1976 marked the end of an era. Zhou Enlai died in January. Zhu De, who as chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress had been serving as nominal head of state, died in July. Finally, Mao himself, the chairman of the party and the embodiment of the revolution, died in September. Although many elderly leaders remained in positions of power, the old guard - the veterans of the Long March and the civil war - was clearly passing from the scene.
There were no provisions for automatic succession. At one time, Lin Biao had been Mao's designated successor, but Lin had died under mysterious circumstances in 1971. The stage was set for a power struggle, with the initial advantage going to the radical faction. Zhou's death left the moderate pragmatists in a weakened position, and Deng Xiaoping, as their most visible leader, came under immediate attack.
In April the people staged an unusual demonstration to protest the removal, by the police, of memorial wreaths honoring Zhou from Beijing's Tiananmen (the Gate of Heavenly Peace leading to the old Forbidden City). With this as an excuse, the radicals blamed Deng for the disorders and dismissed him from office. But the radicals, in turn, lost their protector when Mao died. Within a month, the "Gang of Four" radical leaders, including Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, were arrested, and Deng was reinstated once again. The Gang of Four were subsequently tried and convicted of various crimes against the state. They became a convenient scapegoat for the new leadership, which did not wish to blame China's ills on Mao directly.
In the following years, the pragmatists consolidated their position. Although he did not take any of the main party or government positions, Deng emerged as the outstanding figure within the leadership. An elderly man himself, he brought in younger men who shared his views. The new policies were confirmed in the party and state constitutions adopted in 1982. These included accelerating China's economic development by the best possible means; for example, by rewarding good work, even if this resulted in some inequalities in society. Steps were also taken to prevent the concentration of power that had marked Mao's time. Thus, the new state constitution limited state leaders to two consecutive terms.
Nevertheless, the new leadership remained firmly committed to Communism. The 1982 constitution stated again the Four Fundamental Principles that should guide the society: the leadership of the Communist party, the "people's democratic dictatorship," the socialist road, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. The new constitution allowed a greater measure of political freedom and civil rights, and legal safeguards were introduced. It was evident, however, that there were limits to the new liberalization. After an early period during which considerable freedom of speech was allowed, the post-Mao leadership began to warn against destructive criticism.
9.0 DENG XIAOPING
Deng Xiaoping was born on Aug. 22, 1904, to a wealthy family in Sichuan Province. At age 16 he went to Paris to study. While there he was befriended by Zhou. After he returned home in 1924, Deng joined the Communist party and was sent to the Soviet Union for another year of study. In the political movement led by Mao, he started out as an underground organizer. He participated in the Long March of 1934-35. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, China's Communist government publicly humiliated Deng Xiaoping by parading him through the national capital in a dunce cap. Yet, after the deaths of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1976, he emerged as his country's paramount leader. Whether in exile or in power, Deng was long acclaimed as a reformer who resisted rigid Communist ideology. But his image was tarnished in mid-1989 when he ordered a military crackdown on the student pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in which thousands of pro-democracy protestors were killed. At the same time the government began to build a personality cult around the aging, ailing survivor of purges who had once belittled the similar deification of Mao.
Deng became a vice-premier in 1952, the party secretary in 1954, and a member of the ruling Politburo in 1955. During the Cultural Revolution radical Maoists condemned him as a bourgeois "freak." In 1973 he was rehabilitated under Zhou, and, as the most senior vice-premier, became the effective head of the government during Zhou's later illness. But Mao's supporters were alarmed by his efforts to promote economic reform through "capitalist methods of production." Instead of succeeding Zhou when the premier died, Deng was banished by the radical Gang of Four, an elite group of Mao's supporters led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing.
After Mao's death, the Gang of Four lost power. Until 1980-81 Deng struggled for supreme control with Hua Guofeng, Mao's chosen successor, but he finally engineered the promotions of his own proteges - Zhao Ziyang as premier and Hu Yaobang as party secretary. In late 1987, to force the resignation of senior leaders, Deng gave up his own committee posts. At the beginning of the year Hu Yaobang had been ousted because his leniency toward dissidents and his support of Western-style democracy were blamed for a rash of student demonstrations for reform.
In Deng's next effort to establish the line of succession, Zhao took over the party leadership.
For the rebellious Chinese students, Hu's disgrace had made him a martyr; his death on April 15, 1989, became the catalyst for more aggressive pro-democracy demonstrations that ended in the massacre of unarmed marchers in Peking (Beijing) on June 4. Deng's other designated heir, Zhao, was removed because he favored concessions to the protesters. A new leader, Jiang Zemin, was chosen for his law-and-order stance during similar demonstrations in Shanghai. General Secretary Jiang next took over Deng's chairmanship of the party's Central Military Commission in November 1989. Deng resigned from his last official post in March 1990.
9.1 The Four Modernizations
The new regime's goal was the development of China's economy by means of the Four Modernizations: of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. The Four Modernizations were first announced by Zhou at the tenth party congress in 1973, when the country was just starting its slow recovery from the Cultural Revolution. The new leadership under Deng placed great stress on them, with the aim of bringing China into the front rank among the world's nations.
To achieve the ambitious aims of the program, the new leadership replaced the Maoist dogma of stressing the revolutionary spirit, the "red," with the practical value of the "expert." In education, academic achievements were emphasized, and nationwide college entrance examinations were reinstated. In industry, the authority of experts was reasserted. In agriculture, peasants were allowed private plots. Some overambitious projects were begun, and some replanning proved necessary. Nevertheless, the Chinese were cautiously optimistic that they would attain their goals. They set a reasonable economic growth rate of 7.2 percent per year and began a rigorous campaign to slow the rate of population increase. They hoped that these measures would quadruple industrial and agricultural production by the year 2000. In 1987 Deng retired and was succeeded by Zhao Ziyang as general secretary and Li Peng as premier.
10.0 Jiang Zemin
In the wake of the student-led pro-democracy movement in China, Jiang Zemin emerged as one of the nation's most influential Communist leaders. In June 1989, when the Communist party was purged of its moderate leaders, he was appointed party general secretary and chosen as the heir apparent to the senior leader Deng Xiaoping.
Jiang was born in July 1926 in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. Little is known about his childhood. He joined the Communist party while attending Shanghai's Jiaotong University, where he graduated in 1947 with a degree in electrical engineering. After several Shanghai factory jobs and advanced training in Moscow in the 1950s, Jiang worked up to a top position at a northeastern Chinese automobile plant. He did not hold a government post until 1980. Jiang became a member of the party's Central Committee in 1982 and the Political Bureau in 1987. As the mayor of Shanghai from 1985 until his surprise appointment as general secretary, and later the city's party chief, Jiang had gained recognition as an economic reformer. Many believed the ideologically tough Jiang was chosen to replace the moderate Zhao Ziyang as a reward for his swift action in quelling the student demonstrations in Shanghai.
As general secretary, Jiang called for strict vigilance against what he described as efforts by the West to subvert the Chinese government. In October 1989 the party announced that Jiang would serve as the "core" of the next generation of Chinese leaders.
Jiang's background as a Soviet-trained engineer and his adoption of Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic thinking made him a supporter of further economic reforms, wrapping them in a formula of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." During Jiang's leadership, the Chinese economy became more diverse and its markets gradually attracted foreign investment. Thus, the idea of Chinese socialism acquired a new dimension. The People's Republic of China in the 1990s was a country of mobile phones, joint ventures, Special Economic Zones, Zhang Yimou movies and discos. Politically, the PRC remained a one-party state and Jiang Zemin did not have second thoughts about that.
During his leadership, the PRC survived the Asian financial crisis and saw a smooth return of the British colony of Hong Kong and of Portuguese-controlled Macao. In foreign policy, Jiang's leadership was associated with establishing good relations with Russia and the normalization of relations with the U.S., despite numerous difficulties. The latter supported the PRC in getting "most favoured nation" trading status.
This peaceful foreign policy can be seen as a legacy of Jiang Zemin.
11.0 Hu Jintao
In March 2003 the legislature elected Hu Jintao as president by a vote of 2,937 to 4 with 3 abstentions.
Hu did not succeed Jiang Zemin as Chairman of the Central Military Commissions until 2004/5, after generals expressed concern for Jiang's attempts to cling to power. A Reuters report on 31 August 2012 correctly predicted that Hu planned a clean handover to Xi Jinping of the party leadership, the presidency and the chair of the central military commission over the period end 2012/early 2013, to avoid a repeat of what happened in the transition of power from Jiang Zemin. Hu had been negotiating to promote Li Keqiang to be a vice Chairman of the central military commission, in order that he might retain influence after stepping aside.
One of Hu's assignments in the Politburo Standing Committee was ethnic and minority affairs (according to Willy Lam). Hu was known both for his ability to bring about compromise and his ability to keep his own views hidden.
A US Embassy Cable, dated April 2008 gave the following details about Hu and Tibet policy: "President Hu Jintao remains firmly in charge of China's policy on Tibet, with the leadership unified over Beijing's current hard-line stance and buoyed by rising PRC nationalist sentiment. Given Hu's background and experience in Tibet, as well as the 'extremely sensitive' nature of the issue, no one would 'dare' challenge Hu or the Party line, contacts say. While there may be differences in how various leaders publicly articulate China's Tibet policy, there are no substantive differences among the top leadership. Similarly, Embassy sources do not believe that two recent articles in Party-controlled southern newspapers signaled leadership debate or a review of policy, instead arguing the pieces perhaps reflect an adjustment in the Party's media strategy. The Party has been buoyed by rising nationalist sentiment, fueled in part by anger at the West over 'biased' media reporting on Tibet and Olympic-related protests, but this nationalistic fervor also constrains future policy choices. Regardless, any modification of Tibet policy is unlikely in the short term, at least until after the Olympics, contacts say."
When Hu took over as the general secretary of the CPC Central Committee in 2003, the new leadership made the country's development as its primary job. It focused on how to deal with problems like uncoordinated economic and social development, the growing pressure of resources and environment, as well as the growing income gap, the accumulation of contradictions, environmental pollution, and resources.
In the period, China has achieved coordinated development between urban and rural areas, in economic and social fields, between humans and the nature, between domestic development and opening-up to the outside world. The country has made simultaneous progress in economic, political, cultural, social and bioenvironmental areas.
From 2003 to 2012, China has achieved average yearly economic growth of 10.7 percent, far above the world's 3.9 percent in the same period. The country has taken second place in the world's GDP rally, with an average per-capita annual GDP of 5,432 U.S dollars, up from 1,135 U.S. dollars in 2002.
In the meantime, China has made enormous achievements in different fields, such as lifting the urbanization rate to over 50 percent from less than 40 percent, completing the Three Gorges Project and the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the hosting of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, and conducting manned space journeys and manned deep-sea expeditions.
To deal with the world financial crisis several years ago, the CPC and the Central Government had launched a package of resolutions. These include giving subsidies to the sale of electric home appliances in the countryside, tax reforms, and four trillion yuan (634 billion U.S. dollars)investment by central and local governments. Decisions were also made to revive 10 industries, which helped the country to gain a U-turn in its economic development by then end of 2009.
From 2003 through 2011, the government has poured 16.47 trillion yuan (2.54 trillion U.S. dollars) into areas closely related to people's welfare, including education, health, social security, employment, and housing for low-income families.
In the period, the relations between China and the outside world have witnessed profound changes.
China hosted the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in November 2006, at which President Hu Jintao met with leaders from 48 African nations. The event opened a new chapter in cooperation between the world's largest developing country and the continent with the largest number of developing countries.
Amid the world financial crisis, Hu attended the first summit between leaders of G-20 nations in November 2008, calling for joint efforts to overcome difficulties at that time.
China, now the world's second largest economic power, has played a big role in world affairs over the past decade. It sent warships to protect Chinese and foreign cargo vessels over sea areas plighted with pirates. In June 2012, it pumped an additional 43 billion U.S. dollars into the capital pool of the International Monetary Fund.
12.0 Xi Jinping (2013 onwards)
Xi Jinping succeeded Hu Jintao as Party Secretary-General and Chair of the Central Military Commission in November 2012. Xi was confirmed as China's State President on 14 March 2013.
Xi's first year in office saw an increased crackdown in Tibet and the sentencings of several anti-corruption campaigners (seemingly a direct contradiction of Xi's own anti-corruption campaign) although there were more promising signals in the moves to abolish of Re-education through Labour camps.
November 2013 saw the creation of two major new leading groups led by Xi Jinping - the first on "Overall Reform", in which Xi is joined by Li Keqiang, Liu Yunshan and Zhang Gaoli. The South China Morning Post reported that Xi had named subgroups to focus on six reform categories: economics and ecology; culture; democracy and law; social systems; party building; and party discipline. The second leading group is a National Security Committee which will oversee, coordinate and monitor the country's foreign policy as well as the domestic and defence issues related to security.
China announced its biggest rise in military spending in three years on in March 2014, a strong signal from President Xi Jinping that Beijing is not about to back away from its growing assertiveness in Asia, especially in disputed waters. The government said it would increase the defence budget by 12.2 per cent this year to 808.23 billion yuan ($131.57 billion), as China seeks to develop more high-tech weapons and to beef up coastal and air defences. The increase follows a nearly unbroken run of double-digit hikes in the Chinese defence budget, second only to the United States in size, for the past two decades.
Within hours of the announcement, officials in Japan and Taiwan expressed disquiet over the absence of any details on how Beijing will spend the money - concerns long echoed in Washington with China's defence budgets. China's military spending has allowed Beijing to create a modern force that is projecting power not only across the disputed waters of the East and South China Seas, but further into the western Pacific and Indian Oceans.
Much military spending likely takes place outside the budget, however, and many experts estimate real outlays are closer to $200 billion. The US Defense Department's base budget for fiscal 2014 is $526.8 billion.
The budget spike comes as Asia reacts nervously to a string of recent moves by China to assert its sovereignty in disputed territory, expand its military reach and challenge the traditional dominance of US forces in the region.
Chinese fighters and surveillance planes now routinely patrol a controversial new air defence identification zone that covers disputed Japanese-administered islands in the East China Sea. Meanwhile, Beijing's aircraft carrier went on its first exercises in the South China Sea in late 2013.
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