Chinese Communist Revolution: Founding of the People's Republic
Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic from the gate of the Forbidden City on 1 October 1949. The civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists had been running with interruptions since 1927 and had been suspended for the war with Japan, which destroyed the Nationalist armies and administration far more than it did the Communist base areas. In 1945 the Nationalists had three times the troops, American equipment and the cities, and by 1949 they had lost. The reasons were as much administrative as military. Hyperinflation destroyed the currency and the salaried classes, corruption was general, and the land question was left untouched, while the Communists redistributed land in the areas they held and ran an army whose discipline towards peasants was a deliberate policy. The decisive campaigns were fought in Manchuria and then at Huaihai in late 1948, where some 550,000 Nationalist troops were destroyed or surrendered. Chiang Kai-shek withdrew to Taiwan with the gold reserve, the air force, the navy and about two million people, and continued to claim to be the government of China — a claim the United Nations accepted until 1971. The new state faced a country with almost no industry, a life expectancy around thirty-six, and famine as a normal event. What followed included land reform with perhaps a million landlords killed, then the Great Leap Forward's famine and the Cultural Revolution. It also included literacy, medicine and a doubled life expectancy within a generation. Mao's announcement that the Chinese people had stood up is the sentence every schoolchild learns, and he did not use quite those words. The republic he proclaimed was the fourth Chinese state in forty years and is the one that has lasted.
- Year: 1949 CE
- Category: Political
