• 1950-1953: New Democracy Period

• 1953-1958: First 5 Year Plan/Soviet Model

• 1958-1960: Great Leap Forward

1949-1953: Honeymoon or State Terror?

• Early 1950s ‘Honeymoon’: Stability, Rebuilding, Inclusive rhetoric of ‘new Democracy’

• ‘State Terror’: 1949-1950: Anti-prostitution, anti-drug campaigns in major cities

• 1950: Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries• 1951: Three Antis Campaign (campaign to eliminate

corruption, waste, obstructionist bureaucracy among party members and factory managers

• 1952: Five Antis Campaign ( campaign attacking those industrialists and capitalists that had stayed in China after 1949)

The Soviet Model and the First Five Year Plan 1953-1958

--This is a development model that stresses technology and organization, not ideology

--prioritizes industry over agriculture—main source of capital accumulation taken from agriculture to serve industry (to feed it)

--Stress on large-scale units—integrated production plants—factory as community and work unit

--Emphasis on Material incentives for workers (as opposed to moral/ideological)

--City prioritized over countryside

The Hundred Flowers Campaign

• 1957: Mao encourages ‘one hundred flowers to bloom, one hundred schools of though to contend’

• A period of liberalization in which criticism of the Chinese Communist Party was encouraged

• Mao hoped that the criticisms would match his own distaste of the Soviet model

• Intellectual’s criticisms go far beyond this and Mao orders an ‘anti-rightist’ crackdown against those who put for criticism

Collectivization in the Countryside

• 1950-1953: Land Reform, “Honeymoon” Period

Removes traditional rural elites

Restoration of markets

Distributes land to all individuals

Does not: Increase agricultural production

Mutual Aid Teams

• Mutual Aid Teams (MAT)

A voluntary policy

Farmers encouraged to pool resources—tools, labor, farm animals—to increase production

Land still privately owned

Typically involve 5-15 families

Small Agricultural Producer Cooperatives (APC)

• Land Still Privately Owned, but pooled and collectively farmed.

• Distribution of harvest (profit) based on combination of your land contribution and labor contribution

• 20-40 families

• Hope was that by 1957, 1/3 of agricultural households would be in small APC

Large Agricultural Producer Cooperatives

• NOT voluntary• abolished land ownership• rewards for labor input, not land input• Highly unpopular

Towards Disaster: Carrying out the “Great Leap Forward”

• Return to the core qualities of revolution loved by Mao—speed, rural focus, mass action

• China= “poor and blank”—this is powerful, not negative

• People power, not industrial/bureaucratic expertise will propel China to a utopian future

People’s Communes

• Highest stage of collectivization in the countryside=communes

• Comprise many villages, tens of thousands of people

• Elimination of ALL private property, destruction of ALL rural markets, elimination of money.

• “to each according to their needs”—the state provides for all—no matter what you do!

Furnaces and Communal Dining

• Backyard furnaces—we don’t need expertise or large factories to make steel—farmers can do it!

• Eat all you want, for free, abundant harvest is just around the corner

• Communal mess halls—no more cooking for your family

The Consequences: THE WORST FAMINE IN RECORDED HUMAN HISTORY

• Communes have unprecedented power to mobilize people—but do so recklessly, exhausting people on pointless projects

• Nobody farming enough

• Communes inflating harvest figures to look good to the state

• No tools or fuel—burned up in furnaces

Famine

• No food= 30 MILLION DEATHS between 1959 and 1961

• No relief—a nationwide catastrophe

• People forced to eat bark, grass, finally dirt, and even other people