Following the Chinese Revolution of 1949, China’s economy was in ruin. The new leader, Mao Zedong, was responsible for pulling the economy out of the economic depression. The problems he faced included the low gross domestic product, high inflation, high unemployment, and high prices on goods. In order to solve these issues, Mao sought to follow a more Marxist model, similar to that of the Soviet Union. This was to use government intervention to develop industry in China. In Jan Wong’s Red China Blues, discusses Maoism and how Mao’s policies changed China’s economy for the worse. While some of Mao’s early domestic policies had some positive effects on China’s economy, many of his later policies caused China’s economy to regress.
After coming to power in 1949, one of the first domestic policies Mao’s instated was National Capitalism. This doctrine
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The Five Year Plan nationalized all industries. China took the advice of the USSR and copied their Five Year Plan. In return, China received a $300 million loan from the Soviet Union. More than 11,000 soviet advisors worked in China in the 1950 's to rehabilitate the economy. Jan Wong describes the relationship between China and the USSR in Red China Blues, “For some reason the Chinese were the good guys of communism. The Russians were the bad guys. They had gulags and a menacing secret police called the KGB. The Chinese had pandas and an army in sneakers. Mao was cute, a cultural icon, like Marilyn Monroe.” Wong is commenting on how the USSR helped China because it made them look like Communism had improved their economy. This domestic policy was successful economically because the urban population prospered and grew from 57 million to 100 million by 1957. All industries grew. The heavy industry saw the most growth, while the agricultural industry saw the least. Consequently, prices on goods lowered, including grain
Stalin’s five-year plans and policies affected people in all different ways some farmers were in the midst of famine, others were treated negatively, and some had an optimistic view of Stalin’s plans. Stalin’s five-year plan largely helped out the growing economy, but at the same time it hurt the farmers. Although Stalin was extremely supportive to the publics faces, his reign, starting in the 1920’s, led to the most killings in European history. The Soviet Union ended up surviving another thirty years.
Gittings, John. The Changing Face of China: From Mao to market. Oxford University Press, 2005.
The First Five-Year Plan. The first five-year plan, approved in 1929, proposed that state and collective farms provide 15 percent of agriculture output. The predominance of private farming seemed assured, as many farmers resisted collectivization. By late 1929, Stalin moved abruptly to break peasant resistance and secure the resources required for industrialization. He saw that voluntary collectivism had failed, and many “Soviet economists doubted that the first plan could even be implemented.
Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...
After millions of years under imperial rule in China, nationalist rebellions made the government unstable eventually making way for communist ideas. For over twenty years the nationalist struggled to keep democratic power in the country. The Xinhai revolution was a civil war between the nationalists and the communists. The Communists were led by Mao Zedong and they emerged victoriously. In September 1949, two good things happened. It was the celebration of the communist victory and the unveiling of the communist regime that would subsequently rule over China. Mao and his communist supporters had been fighting against a corrupt and abandoned Nationalist government in China. Mao denounced that those who opposed the communist government are imperialistic and domestic reactionaries. Mao also declared that communi...
...e up with his Five Year Plan to try to create more of a world power by increasing China’s industry. At the beginning of the Revolution, China had been receiving money from the Soviet Union because they signed the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. This money allowed China to start to actually modernize its industries. Mao’s Five Year Plan’s main goal was to create better industry but also create more and better production of steel, coal, and iron. TO achieve these goals factories and mines were given specific goals to achieve and if they did not meet these goals, the factory believed they were failing its own people. Because of Mao’s Plan, the economic growth rose and most of the goals set were accomplished. The only problem was that the success of it was because there were a lot of Soviet Union advisers that helped China through the Plan.
This was a program which called for major steel production. Mao Zedong wanted to make China a “first-class modern power”(221). Mao wanted the steel production of the country to double in only one year, as he called on the whole population to help. All other work and schooling stopped. There was a new quota for each unit to produce.
...ral Revolution, Mao wished to eliminate the threat like the bourgeoisie thought, capitalism in the society. While in the Great Leap Forward, Mao wished to implement communism. For instance, building state-owned industrial economy, organize all peasants into agricultural cooperatives; establish people’s communes throughout China’s rural areas. All these are aim to build new socialist economic system through socialist transformation and nationalization of major industries and creating a Soviet-type centrally planned socialist economy.
In the late 1920’s, living in Lenin’s shadow, Stalin decided that the New Economic Policy would introduce the Five-Year Plan.
Programs such as collectivization and land reformation were essentially a microcosm of Mao's impact on China. Under the policy of collectivization, the government promoted cooperative farming and redistributed the land on the principle that the product of labor could be better distributed if the la...
The ideology of Mao and Stalin both sought to eliminate class differences and advance their nation. They both also used terror as a way of acquiring what they wanted. As Mao was born into a middle-class peasant family, he knew of hardship and constant dissatisfaction with the government. He became concerned with the future of his country after the failure of the 1911 revolution, and after much reading of western works, was convinced the only way to bring change to China was through military practices; that “all power grows out from the barrel of a gun.” His ideology was based on and formed mostly around Marxism-Leninism, as was Stalin’s, therefore both believed that the huge numbers of working class and peasants in their country would overthrow the bourgeoisie and rise and take over the government, leading to equality of all and abolishing the class system thereby creating a socialist society. However one difference in their ideologies was that where Mao believed in a ‘Continuous or Permanent Revolution’ (much like Stalin’s rival, Trovsky), Stalin believed in ‘Socialism in One Country’. Marx originally used the term “Continuous Revolution” to describe a strategy for the revolutionary class to continue to fight for their own interests regardless of the attentions of opposing political parties. While explaining that concept, Engels posed the question "Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?” to which he answers “No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.” However, Stalin disagreed with Engels and made ‘Socialism in One Country’ his ultimate goal for Russia.
This essay has critically analysed and examined the effect of Communism on the Chinese Society during the period of 1946-1964. The overall conclusion that can be drawn is that the Chinese Communist Party managed to defeat the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party and achieve victory in the Civil War, in spite of alienation by the Soviet Union and opposition from the U.S. This was primarily because of the superior military strategy employed by the Communists and the economic and political reforms introduced by this party which brought more equality to the peasants in the form of land ownership and better public services. This increased China’s production and manufacturing which not only boosted the country’s economy but also provided a more sustainable supply of food, goods and services for the Chinese people.
In China, the People’s Republic of China was the Chinese communist party headed by Chairman Mao Zedong. During his rule, Chairman Mao’s most famous event was his second “5 Year Plan” or better known as China’s Great Leap Forward in 1958. The Great Leap forward was similar to Russia’s 5 year plan as it had focused on focused on the countries heavy industry. The People’s Republic of China had put in price controlling regulations on the market, enforced a Chinese character simplification in order to increase the low literacy rates, and finally implement large-scale industrialization
From the 1970s, there has been a wave of liberalization in China, which was introduced by Deng Xiaoping. This is one of the key reasons to the rise of China to be one of the economic giants in the world. In the last 25 years of the century, the Chinese economy has had massive economic growth, which has been 9.5 percent on a yearly basis. This has been of great significance of the country since it quadrupled the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country thus leading to saving of 400 million of their citizens from the threats of poverty. In the late 1970s, China was ranked twentieth in terms of trade volumes in the whole world as well as being predicted to be the world’s top nation concerning trading activities (Kaplan, 53). This further predicted the country to record the highest GDP growth in the whole world.
When the new Chinese Government was set up in 1949, the new government faced a lot of problems. First on their agenda was how to re-build the country. As Communist Party of China (CPC) is a socialist party, their policies at the time were similar to that of the Soviet Union’s. Consequently, the CPC used a centrally planned strategy as its economic strategy when it first began. For a long time, the Chinese economy was a centrally planned economy in which none other than the state owned all companies. In fact, there were absolutely no entrepreneurs. As time went on, the problems of a centrally planned economy started to appear, such as low productivity, which was the key reason for restricting the development of China. With the population growing, the limitations of the centrally planned economy were clear. In 1978 China started its economic reform whose goal was to generate sufficient surplus value to finance the modernization of the Chinese economy. In the beginning, in the late 1970s and early 19...