“People like me sound like a lot of big cannons.” The quotation was made by the Chairman of The People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao Zedong. Mao, as one of the Communist party’s founders, had successfully led his followers against the Nationalist in the Civil war (1946-1949), unifying and reforming China to a new era. By studying Chang’s biography “Wild Swans”, this essay aims to investigate the totalitarian governance style under Mao through different political events filled in Chang’s personal memory.
During Mao’s thirty-years ruling from 1949 to 1976, he had always adopted an extreme idealism to unify the Chinese. According to Chow, idealism regulates the conscious level of its people, anyone who show the regulated image is to be identified as good (Chow 1998; 43). The policy was particularly obvious at the early stage of PRC. China was in a complete mass after a long war-period and its economy was also declining.
…show more content…
To get massive support from the peasants, Mao promoted equality through the Land Reform (1950-1953), which in favor of the lower class. In “Wild Swans”, Chang’s mother, who lived in the countryside of Chengdu, saw peasants wore fine clothes while landlords were being overtly criticized by the villagers after the redistribution of land ownership (Chang 2003; 195). Peasants could now own their pieces of land. In Mao’s spirit, a new China must be obtained by acceptable social practices and thus class division and bourgeoisie activities were not allowed. The Land Reform shows a sign to equally distributed properties among China. Economically, Mao also implemented planned economy since 1953 to comply with the nation’s equilibrium political direction when Chang’s mother was busy in promoting the “unified purchasing
After coming to power in 1949, one of the first domestic policies Mao’s instated was National Capitalism. This doctrine
Rae Yang’s Memoir “Spider Eaters” is a poignant personal story of a girl growing up amidst the political upheaval during the establishment of People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong’s Communist leadership. Yang describes the fascinating journey of her life from her early years as the daughter of Chinese diplomats in Switzerland to a student in an elite middle school then a fanatic Red-guard and eventually a laborer in a pig farm. Her experiences through the revolution serve as an eye-opener and lead to her eventual disillusionment of the Communist revolution in China. There are many factors that contributed to her growing discontent with communism such as the anti-rightist movement which was an effort to rule out any criticism against the government, corruption and violence of the party leaders who abused their power and continued to exploit the peasants, the false claim of proletariat dictatorship used merely to eradicate bourgeoisie and further the interests of party members.
William Hinton, a US born member of a Chinese Communist land reform task force in 1948, noted that the peasants were challenging the landlords and money lenders in regards to overcharges and restoration of lands and property seized in default of debts (Doc 4). This was due to the newly found confidence in themselves through the defeat of the Japanese. Although Hinton was born into the communist party, his recount of the actions he saw concerning the peasants was simply from a look from the outside in. He personally did not experience this sudden upsurge of challenges, which gives the public a view of what the communist party thought of what looked like a move towards social equality. Although Hinton’s recount may not have been thoroughly verified, the communist party did indeed aid in fueling what was known as a struggle meeting, where Chinese peasants humiliated and tortured landlords, as seen in the picture, organized by the Communist Party as part of the land reform process, of a group of peasants at a meeting where in the center a woman is with her former landlord (Doc 7). Alongside the destruction of the landowning infrastructure that was previously followed, the Communist party also aided the peasants in a form of social reform. One important law that granted specifically women more freedom in their social life was the creation of the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China in 1950, where it states that the “supremacy of man over woman, and in disregard of the interest of the children, is abolished” (Doc 5). The newly introduced concepts of free choice in partners, abortion, and monogamy that derived from this law changed the societal position on women and peasants which greatly expresses the amount of new social mobility
This essay will concentrate on the comparison and analysis of two communist figures: Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist Party in China, and Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. The main focus of this paper will be to explore each figure’s world view in depth and then compare and contrast by showing their differences and similarities. Joseph Stalin was a realist dictator of the early 20th century in Russia. Before he rose to power and became the leader of the Soviet Union, he joined the Bolsheviks and was part of many illegal activities that got him convicted and he was sent to Siberia (Wood, 5, 10). In the late 1920s, Stalin was determined to take over the Soviet Union (Wiener & Arnold, 1999).
Ever since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the legitimacy of the revolution of which it was built upon has perennially been in question. For example, in a 1999 issue of the International Herald Tribune, a prestigious scholar claimed that all of China’s tragedies are ‘sustained by a mistaken belief in the correctness of the 1949 revolution’ and that the future progress of China depends on the recognition that the revolution was a failure. However, the CCP government was certainly not perfect and its most significant failures were its political failures such as the Anti-rightist movement and the Cultural Revolution and also economic failures such as the great leap forward. Millions of peoples were falsely accused and persecuted during the political movements of the Mao period as the CCP focused on class struggle instead of economic development during the period and tens of Millions of peoples died due to starvation as there were widespread food shortages during the great leap forward movement.
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...
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...
signs that the Christian ear was coming to an end and the birth of a
It can also be argued that the political activities of Chairman Mao’s Communist China were more of a continuation of traditional Imperial China, based heavily in Confucian values, than a new type of Marxist-Leninist China, based on the Soviet Union as an archetype. While it is unquestionable that a Marxist-Leninist political structure was present in China during this time, Confucian values remained to be reinforced through rituals and were a fundamental part of the Chinese Communist ...
The Chinese people experienced rapid changes, in government and their own culture in the 20th century. In the book, Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, she depicts the experiences of not only oppression and suffering, but the development of the communist revolution, under Mao. Also, to show how the Chinese people, women in particular, fought against impossible odds by interweaving historical and personal stories from the twentieth century China.
The spread of Communism and its ideals significantly increased during the final stages of the Chinese Civil War which intensified after the Second World War and resulted in a victory to the Communists in October 1949. At this time, the majority of the provinces in China were led by either the GMD or the CCP. However, the civilians in the GMD-ruled cities were suffering rapid inflation, strikes, violence and riots which led to a collapse of public order. Adding to this instability, corruption was rife within the Nationalist party’s leadership.... ... middle of paper ...
More murderous than Hitler, more powerful than Stalin, in the battle of the Communist leaders Mao Zedong trumps all. Born into a comfortable peasant family, Mao would rise up to become China’s great leader. After leading the communists away from Kuomintang rule, he set out to modernize China, but the results of this audacious move were horrific. He rebounded from his failures time and again, and used his influence to eliminate his enemies and to purge China of its old ways. Mao saw a brighter future for China, but it was not within his grasp; his Cultural Revolution was not as successful as he had wanted it to be. Liberator, oppressor, revolutionary, Mao Zedong was the greatest emancipator in China’s history, as his reforms and actions changed the history of China and of the wider world.
Dressed in the drab military uniform that symbolized the revolutionary government of Communist China, Mao Zedong's body still looked powerful, like an giant rock in a gushing river. An enormous red flag draped his coffin, like a red sail unfurled on a Chinese junk, illustrating the dualism of traditional China and the present Communist China that typified Mao. 1 A river of people flowed past while he lay in state during the second week of September 1976. Workers, peasants, soldiers and students, united in grief; brought together by Mao, the helmsman of modern China. 2 He had assembled a revolutionary government using traditional Chinese ideals of filial piety, harmony, and order. Mao's cult of personality, party purges, and political policies reflect Mao's esteem of these traditional Chinese ideals and history.
The declaration of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 by the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong signified a revolution in China that brought an end to the costliest civil war in Chinese history between the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that had lasted a period of 22 years from 1927 to 1949. The Chinese revolution of 1949 signified the beginning of an era of Communist Chinese rule ushered in by the popular Chinese Communist Party at the expense of the Nationalist Party. According to historian Michael Lestz, the Communist victory was an inevitability that was aided by the actions of the preceding Nationalist government (Lestz, 2010). Lestz states that the weakness and administration ineptitude displayed by the Nationalist Party in economic, military and civil affairs created an environment that was conducive for the Communist Party to prosper. Author John King elaborates that the Nationalist party did more to lose the peasants’ support than the Communist party did to gain the peasants’ favor (King, 2006). Therefore, this paper will focus on the failures of the Nationalist Party in the Civil War and World War II coupled with the consequences. It will compound the various issues that harbored the Nationalist Party such as corruption and the failure of the government to accommodate or abate Communist dissent. The paper will also cover the failed efforts by Nationalist Party to integrate Western policies into China.
...ism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.” Mao did what was more important to the Chinese society no matter the consequences to achieve it. Mao did a lot of good things for China, but the overall impact was in great amount that the good part couldn't cover up the bad parts in its revolution. One of the major impacts was his bad start of “The Great Leap Forward,” then to “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” had to make up the losses. Many historians see this revolution was a failure, even though he did accomplish some of its goals. When Mao had power in the hands, he had to deal with numbers of interventions, from beginning to end. He faced criticisms when his first idea failed. Then with intervention of the US. At last the revolution changed people way of thinking, doing and equality. Everything was done for the good of China.