From New Democracy to socialist transformation

The promise of coalition and recovery: from the Common Program to leaning to one side

The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference that met in Beiping in September 1949 brought together, besides the Communists, democratic parties such as the China Democratic League and the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang and non-party figures. The Common Program it adopted made a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance the form of the state, while promising protection of the national bourgeoisie’s private property, a mixed economy of state, co-operative, private capitalist and state capitalist sectors, and a coalition of the democratic classes. Non-Communists such as Soong Ching-ling, Li Jishen and Zhang Lan became vice-chairmen of the Central People’s Government. But in “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” Mao had already spelled out the class limits of this coalition: the national bourgeoisie could not lead the revolution and should not have the chief role in state power. 1 2 3 4

The new government’s first tasks were to tame hyperinflation and restore the economy. Chen Yun took control of grain and cotton yarn through state trading companies and unified currency and finance, stabilising prices by spring 1950. Banking was nationalised under the People’s Bank of China, and by 1952 price stability and commerce had been restored and industry and agriculture had regained their previous peak levels. The mixed economy of these years was led by the state sector but private industry, commerce and markets coexisted with it; in 1952 17 per cent of industrial units were still outside the state system. In February 1951 an enlarged Politburo meeting ordered that the idea of “three years for preparation and ten years for planned economic construction” be made clear to all cadres. On that timetable socialist construction was a long process spread over the ten years after 1953. 5 6 7 8 9

In December 1949 Mao went to Moscow on his first trip abroad, timed for Stalin’s seventieth birthday. Stalin wanted to keep the treaty concluded with the Nationalist government in 1945, and for weeks Mao was left virtually idle at a dacha. Negotiations began in earnest when Zhou Enlai joined him in January 1950, and the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance was signed on 14 February. The Soviet Union promised a $300 million loan at 1 per cent and the return of the Changchun Railway and Port Arthur by 1952, but in return China accepted the independence of Outer Mongolia and had to repay the loan in strategic minerals. In Xinjiang a joint non-ferrous and rare metals company remained under virtually complete Soviet control, and Mao sensed Soviet paternalism in such joint companies. 10 11 12

“Leaning to one side”, siding with the Soviet Union, was a line Mao had already proclaimed in June 1949. The treaty set China’s place in the Cold War, and Soviet equipment, technicians and credit went into the 156 key projects of the First Five-Year Plan that began in 1953. At the Anshan steelworks in the Northeast the “Three Major Projects”, a seamless-pipe factory, a large rolling mill and a blast furnace, began in 1951 with Soviet advisers, and the First Automotive Works at Changchun, begun in 1953, produced its first Jiefang CA-10 truck, based on the Soviet ZIS-150, in 1956. But Mao’s resentment of Stalin’s treatment later became a personal background to the Sino-Soviet split. 13 14 15 16 5

Land reform, 1950–1952

At the Third Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee in June 1950 Liu Shaoqi gave the report on land reform, and on 28 June the Central People’s Government Council passed the Land Reform Law. As head of the Central Land Reform Committee Liu guided reform in the newly liberated villages of the south and west. The law confiscated and redistributed the landlords’ “five big properties”, land, draught animals, surplus grain, farm tools and surplus housing, while letting landlords keep commercial enterprises and other personal belongings; it forbade touching middle peasants’ land and, unlike the civil-war reforms, preserved the rich-peasant economy and exempted law-abiding rich peasants from struggle. At the same plenum Mao said the landlord class would be toppled in areas with 310 million people still facing land reform, but that other strata must not be made enemies all at once. 17 18 19 20

Work teams entered the villages, divided the inhabitants into landlords, rich, middle and poor peasants and labourers, and held “speak bitterness” meetings and struggle sessions. At first the reform was milder than in the civil war, but when the Korean War broke out the leadership feared that landlords would use it to resist the new order, and around May 1951 land reform “lurched violently to the left”. Mao ordered that excesses not be corrected prematurely and wanted the peasants themselves, not the public security organs, to denounce and kill the landlords, binding the peasants to the revolution. Beatings were not officially promoted but were not prohibited either. The Politburo resolution of February 1951 told cadres to persuade the peasants that torture was illegal and should not be used, yet there were reports of public executions of landlords in village after village. 18 9

By 1953 land reform was complete in most of the mainland, except some minority areas such as Xinjiang, Tibet and Qinghai. By official count more than 300 million landless or land-poor peasants received some 700 million mu (47 million hectares) of land and means of production, and roughly 30 million tons of grain rent paid yearly to landlords was abolished. About 45 per cent of the arable land passed from landlords and wealthier farmers to the 60–70 per cent of farm households that had owned little or none. Official figures put the 1952 grain harvest 42.8 per cent above 1949, and 39 per cent of farm households belonged to “mutual-aid teams” of six or seven households. The reform swept away the old power of the village elite and rooted party organisation down to the village. Estimates of landlords killed range from 200,000 to five million, many scholars giving a range of one to two million. 21 8 17 18

Resist America, Aid Korea and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries

On 8 October 1950 Mao, as chairman of the People’s Revolutionary Military Commission, ordered the formation of the Chinese People’s Volunteers, and the Volunteers under Peng Dehuai crossed the Yalu on 19 October, the leadership judging that UN forces advancing deep into North Korea threatened the industrial heartland of the Northeast. The war ended with the armistice of 27 July 1953, and the Volunteers had all withdrawn by October 1958. Mao’s eldest son Mao Anying, a Volunteer officer, was killed in a UN air strike. China’s dead number 183,108 by the official revision of 2010 and 197,653 by a state-media report of 2020, while the US Department of Defense estimated about 400,000 killed and 486,000 wounded; some three million personnel served in all. 22 23 24 5

The war lent every domestic campaign the justification of “protecting home and country”. In February 1951 the Politburo ordered the propaganda and education campaign to resist US aggression and aid Korea pushed into every corner of the country. With China’s entry into the war the moderate policies of the first year gave way to a massive campaign against “enemies of the state”, actual and potential. On 10 October 1950 Mao issued the “Directive on Suppressing Counter-revolutionary Activities”, the Double Ten Directive, telling the public security minister Luo Ruiqing that “we must not miss this opportunity”. The targets were Kuomintang remnants and agents, secret societies and “bandits”, and religious sects; foreigners and Christian missionaries were tried at mass trials as American agents. With the UN declaring China an aggressor and voting an embargo, the People’s Republic’s chance of entering the UN closed for the time being. 9 5 25

Mao sent execution “quotas” down to the provinces. He argued that roughly 0.1 per cent of the population would have to be executed to remove the worst counter-revolutionaries, later suggesting 0.05 per cent with 0.1 per cent as a ceiling; in January 1951 he wired Shanghai that one to two thousand executions might be needed that year, and told Guangdong that it was “very good” it had already killed more than 3,700. Public executions at mass rallies peaked in spring 1951. A 1954 report by Deputy Public Security Minister Xu Zirong counted 712,000 executed, 1.29 million imprisoned and 1.2 million placed under control, 2.62 million arrested in all, and in 1957 Mao said 700,000 had been killed in 1950–1952. Yang Kuisong holds that actual executions far exceeded the official figure, and researchers’ estimates run from 500,000 to two million. 25 18 26

Intellectuals were required to undergo thought reform. After Zhou Enlai called in September 1951 for intellectuals to reform their thinking, university teachers, scientists and other professionals were made to perform self-criticism and public confession and to purge their “worship” of America; the movement merged with the Three-anti and Five-anti campaigns in 1952. In May 1951 Mao personally directed the criticism of the film The Life of Wu Xun as a warning to the world of letters. Artists and writers were soon treated the same way for failing to heed Mao’s dictum that literature must reflect the class interest of the working people led by the Communist Party. 27 5 28

Three-anti and Five-anti: purifying cadres, subordinating capitalists

The Three-anti campaign, launched in the Northeast at the end of 1951, targeted cadres’ corruption, waste and bureaucratism; the Five-anti campaign of 1952 targeted capitalists’ bribery, theft of state property, tax evasion, cheating on government contracts and theft of state economic information. “Tiger-hunting” rallies at which workers and clerks denounced their employers swept the business world of Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing. By late 1951 Shanghai alone had up to 15,000 trained propagandists; 18,000 denunciation letters arrived in the first week of February 1952 and 210,000 by the end of the first month. Mao said that ten thousand to several tens of thousands of embezzlers would probably have to be executed nationwide. Fines and back payments moved enterprise assets to the state, and many owners borrowed from the government to pay their fines. In Shanghai alone at least 876 people killed themselves between 25 January and 1 April 1952. 29 5

The Five-anti campaign in effect withdrew the protection of national capital promised by the Common Program. On Mao’s instructions private industrial and commercial units were classified into five categories: law-abiding, basically law-abiding, partly law-abiding and partly law-breaking, seriously law-breaking and completely law-breaking, the first three said to make up about 95 per cent in the big cities. The party claimed to have uncovered an organised attempt by businessmen to corrupt party and government officials, and this charge was enlarged into an assault on the bourgeoisie as a whole. The state, controlling raw materials and sales, tied private firms to the plan through processing orders and unified purchasing. As the campaign depressed the economies of Shanghai and Tianjin, regional authorities such as the Northwest Bureau revised their policies to keep “striking tigers” while stabilising the economy. The number of people affected by the punitive or reform campaigns was estimated in the millions. 30 5 29 31

The general line for the transition and the grain monopoly, 1952–1953

From September 1952 Mao repeatedly spoke of a general line for the transition period. When Finance Minister Bo Yibo introduced a new tax system in December 1952 based on “equality between public and private enterprises”, Mao condemned it as a question of ideology and a departure from the party’s general line, and the National Conference on Financial and Economic Work in the summer of 1953 attacked Bo fiercely. At an enlarged Politburo meeting on 15 June 1953 Mao gave the first fairly complete formulation of the general line: to accomplish basically the industrialisation of the country and the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts and capitalist industry and commerce in ten to fifteen years or a little longer. He rebutted as Right deviationist the slogans “firmly establish the new-democratic social order” and “sustain private property” put forward by Liu Shaoqi and others. 32 33 34

The central committee finalised the wording of the general line in December 1953, and it entered the Fourth Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee in February 1954 and the constitution in September, becoming the basic programme of the state. Criticism was aimed outside the party too. When the rural reconstruction activist Liang Shuming said at a session of the Central People’s Government Council on 16–18 September 1953 that “the workers are up in the ninth heaven whereas the peasants are down in the ninth hell” and that industrialisation was abandoning the peasants, Mao attacked his “reactionary ideas” at length on the spot. From then on a non-Communist who openly criticised state policy paid a heavy price. 32 35

The problem of financing industrialisation broke out over grain. As urban and industrial demand grew and speculation compounded it, the state’s grain deficit reached four billion jin by June 1953. Chen Yun proposed planned purchase and planned supply at the National Grain Conference on 10 October; after a central committee resolution on 16 October and an order of the Government Administration Council on 23 November, the “unified purchase and sale” of grain began in December everywhere except Tibet. In the countryside the state bought grain at prices and in kinds it fixed, in the cities it rationed fixed quantities, and private grain trading was strictly prohibited. Cotton was added in 1954 and the system lasted until 1985. It stabilised grain prices and secured primitive accumulation for industry, but it is also judged to have dampened the peasants’ incentive and hardened the urban–rural divide. 36 6

The Gao Gang–Rao Shushi affair

In autumn 1952, ahead of the First Five-Year Plan, the centre called the first men of the large regions, Gao Gang, Rao Shushi, Deng Zihui, Deng Xiaoping and Xi Zhongxun, to Beijing to reduce regional power, an episode known as the “five horses entering the capital”. Gao, called the “king” of the Northeast, became chairman of the State Planning Commission in charge of eight economic ministries, and Rao head of the party Organisation Department. When Mao confided to Gao his dissatisfaction with Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai over tax reform and other matters, Gao read it as a signal about the succession. At the financial and economic conference in summer 1953 he attacked Bo Yibo and Liu, and he used a draft Politburo list prepared by Liu’s associates, which increased the representation of those who had worked in the Kuomintang-controlled “white areas”, to win support among veterans of the base areas. In September Rao opposed Liu at the organisation work conference by attacking An Ziwen. 37 38

Marshals Peng Dehuai and Lin Biao supported Gao, but Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun sensed something amiss and reported to Mao. When in December 1953 Mao proposed that Liu Shaoqi act for him while he was in the south, Gao argued for rotation and lobbied frantically for his own promotion to vice-chairman or general secretary. At an enlarged Politburo meeting on 24 December Mao criticised him without naming him: “there are two headquarters in Beijing”. In February 1954 the Fourth Plenum adopted the “Resolution on Strengthening Party Unity”; Gao, after a failed attempt to shoot himself that month, was placed under house arrest and killed himself with sleeping pills on 17 August. Rao was arrested in January 1955 and died in prison in 1975. In March 1955 a national party conference branded the two an “anti-party alliance” and expelled them. The first leadership purge of the People’s Republic showed that the frame of “two headquarters within the party” could be used by Mao at any time. 38 37 39 40

The affair also touched relations with the Soviet Union. Gao had embraced Soviet methods of industrial organisation and planning and served as a channel to the Soviets in the advisory stage of the Five-Year Plan, and from 1952 he urged rapid collectivisation to check the peasants’ capitalist tendencies. His fall left the affair’s ostensible issues at odds with the real dispute over pace: the man brought down was Gao, an advocate of rapid socialisation, but the one who then actually accelerated it was Mao himself. Deng Xiaoping entered the Politburo and Chen Yun became a party vice-chairman in 1956. 38

The First Five-Year Plan and the constitution of 1954

In early 1952 Zhou Enlai drafted the First Five-Year Plan with Chen Yun, Bo Yibo, Li Fuchun and Nie Rongzhen, but Soviet experts in Moscow rejected it, and in early 1953 Gao Gang’s State Planning Commission prepared the final version. The plan (1953–1957) concentrated on 694 large and medium industrial projects, including 156 with Soviet aid, and set the tasks of moving agriculture and handicrafts into co-operatives and capitalist industry and commerce onto the track of state capitalism. For planning purposes the first modern census was taken in 1953, which found mainland China’s population to be 583 million, far more than anticipated. Technical agreements were signed with the Soviet Union in 1953 and 1954, and large numbers of Soviet technicians helped build the plants. 6 13 41 42

A constitution was also written to fix the general line in legal form. Stalin had repeatedly advised convening a people’s congress and adopting a constitution: during Liu Shaoqi’s visit in 1949, during Mao’s visit in 1950, and in reply to Liu’s letter of October 1952. On 13 January 1953 the Central People’s Government Council set up a drafting committee chaired by Mao, who at the end of the year took a drafting group to West Lake in Hangzhou to work on the text. On 14 June 1954 he explained that the draft rested on two basic principles, democracy and socialism. The First National People’s Congress, convened after elections held in 1953, adopted the 106-article constitution on 20 September 1954; its preamble recorded the general line for the transition period and the “indestructible friendship” with the Soviet Union. Mao became chairman of the state, Liu Shaoqi chairman of the NPC Standing Committee and Zhou Enlai premier of the State Council, and the CPPCC handed over its legislative functions. 43 44 45 41 17

The year after the new constitution listed basic rights, a purge of the literary world and of institutions began. In January 1955 the party’s Publicity Department proposed criticising the Marxist literary critic Hu Feng, and in May, after Shu Wu handed over his correspondence with Hu to serve as evidence of a “counter-revolutionary clique”, Hu was arrested on 17 May. Mao personally wrote a preface and editor’s notes for the published letters. By official count some 2,100 people were implicated and 92 arrested. The campaign grew into the sufan of 1955–1957, a drive to eliminate hidden counter-revolutionaries. By September 1955 2.2 million people had been investigated; by its end in October 1957 more than 18 million had been targeted, 214,000 arrested and 22,000 executed, and 53,000 had died in all. 46 47 48

The “socialist upsurge”: co-operativisation and joint state-private ownership, 1955–1956

After land reform the countryside was meant to pass through stages: mutual-aid teams, lower-stage co-operatives in which members contributed land and drew dividends, and advanced co-operatives distributing only by labour. By June 1955 there were 650,000 lower-stage co-operatives with 16.9 million member households. That April Mao had proposed doubling their number to 1.3 million, while Deng Zihui, head of the party’s Rural Work Department, wanted to increase it only by half, to one million. On 31 July, in his report to provincial, municipal and regional secretaries “On the Co-operative Transformation of Agriculture”, Mao declared that a socialist upsurge was imminent in the countryside while “some of our comrades, tottering along like a woman with bound feet,” did nothing but complain that it was going too fast. In October an enlarged Sixth Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee condemned Deng Zihui for “Right opportunism”. 49 50 51 42

Thereafter the pace was explosive. By the end of 1956 96.3 per cent of farm households were in co-operatives, and in 1957 93.5 per cent were in advanced co-operatives. The party plan had put the move to advanced co-operatives in the period of the Second Five-Year Plan, but within little more than a year almost the whole countryside had been collectivised. More than 90 per cent of handicraft workers had also joined co-operatives by the end of 1956. The cost was high. Demands to “leave the co-operative” arose from 1955, over 70,000 households quitting in Guangdong alone, and the withdrawal movement peaked in 1956–1957: the advanced co-operatives had not delivered the promised rise in income, peasants had lost the freedom to move and to take up sideline work, and cadres often punished members arbitrarily or tied them up and beat them. The grain monopoly of 1953 and the household registration regulation of 1958 bound the peasants still more tightly to the land. 52 13 42 53

In the cities the whole of private industry and commerce passed, trade by trade, into “joint state-private ownership” within a few months from the second half of 1955. In September 1954 the Government Administration Council had passed interim regulations on joint state-private ownership, and in November 1955 the central committee convened a meeting to lead the conversion of whole trades. On 10 January 1956 Beijing became the first city to announce the conversion of every trade, followed by Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Wuhan and others, and parades were organised in which capitalists “applied” for conversion to the sound of gongs and drums. The “four horses share the fodder” division of profits among state taxes, reserves, welfare and the capitalists’ dividend gave way to a “fixed interest” of 5 per cent a year on the assessed assets, which ended in September 1966. Co-operative capitalists such as Rong Yiren of Shanghai were treated as “red capitalists”. Official history calls this the peaceful “redemption” of the bourgeoisie that Marx and Lenin had envisaged. 54 52 55 31

1956: the model completed and the first cracks

The First Five-Year Plan succeeded in the areas the Soviet-style strategy emphasised. Industrial production grew by an average 18.7 per cent a year in 1953–1957 and national income by 9 per cent a year, and 595 large and medium projects were completed, laying a modern foundation in iron and steel, coal, cement, power and machine building. Agriculture, including water conservancy, received only 4 per cent of the state investment budget, and the leaders grew increasingly worried about agriculture’s sluggish growth and the inability of state commerce to procure enough grain for the cities. State and planning, and an urban society of work units and the “iron rice bowl”, were built on the Soviet model. 13 42

That very year, however, the model itself was shaken. In February 1956 Khrushchev’s secret speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” denounced Stalin and Stalinism, and on 25 April Mao, in “On the Ten Major Relationships” at an enlarged Politburo meeting, called for learning from the defects and errors of Soviet construction and spoke of a “Chinese road” adjusting the relations between heavy industry and light industry and agriculture, centre and localities, the Han and the minorities. Zhou Enlai, backed by Liu Shaoqi, pushed an “opposition to rash advance” that scaled back overambitious targets, to Mao’s displeasure. The Eighth Party Congress of 15–27 September, at which 1,026 delegates represented 10.73 million members, declared that the socialist system had been basically established and that the principal contradiction within the country was no longer between the working class and the bourgeoisie but between the people’s demand for rapid economic and cultural development and an economy and culture that fell short of it. Mao Zedong Thought was dropped from the party constitution and opposition to the personality cult was stressed. 56 57 17 58 59 31

The pace of transformation left problems behind. Peasants’ will to work fell in the advanced co-operatives, demands to leave and disturbances continued in some areas in 1956–1957, and the Hungarian revolution in October shocked the leadership with the possibility that a Communist party’s legitimacy could collapse. In February 1957 Mao proposed to treat these tensions as “contradictions among the people” and invited intellectuals to criticise, and the result was the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaign. The confidence and the unease of 1956 together prepared the radicalisation of the following decade. 52 56 60 61

Assessment: socialism in seven years

The party’s 1981 “Resolution on History” praises 1949–1956 as the period in which the transition from New Democracy to socialism was gradually achieved, the economy was rapidly rehabilitated and the socialist transformation of private ownership of the means of production was in the main completed. It credits the devising of transitional forms, from lower to higher forms of state capitalism and from mutual-aid teams to lower and then advanced co-operatives, with achieving the peaceful redemption of the bourgeoisie. But the same resolution concedes that from the summer of 1955 the co-operativisation of agriculture and the transformation of handicrafts and commerce were “over-hasty” and “the changes were too fast”, done in a summary, stereotyped manner that left questions open for a long time, and that after 1956 former industrialists and businessmen were not properly employed and handled. 31

Two readings confront each other on why a state that promised a “coalition of classes” abolished private property within seven years. One holds that the mixed economy of the Common Program was a serious long-term strategy, ended early by the Korean War and the Cold War, the grain crisis and Mao’s impatience. The other holds that the report to the Second Plenum had already spoken of transforming new-democratic into socialist society, and that once “restriction versus opposition to restriction” was named the main class struggle the coalition was transitional from the start. The general line of 1953 and the “upsurge” of 1955 are turning points in both readings. The term New Democracy faded from official discourse after 1953. 62 63 9 34

The figures do not settle into single values. Landlord deaths in land reform are put at 200,000 to five million; executions in the suppression of counter-revolutionaries run from the official 712,000 to researchers’ estimates of two million; suicides in the Three-anti and Five-anti campaigns range from at least 876 in Shanghai in three months to claims of hundreds of thousands nationwide. China’s dead in the Korean War are given as 180,000–200,000 officially against the US Defense Department’s 400,000. Co-operativisation is reported as 96.3 per cent (households in co-operatives at the end of 1956), 90 per cent (“preliminary collectivisation”) or 93.5 per cent (advanced co-operatives, 1957), depending on the measure. Stuart Schram left the question of the period as how to weigh hundreds of millions of peasants getting land against the execution of millions, some of whom certainly did not deserve to die. 18 25 29 24 52 41 42 11

In the history of the socialist movement these seven years were a case of a semi-colonial agrarian country covering in a short time, with relatively little loss of output, the road the Soviet Union had travelled over a decade and more of civil war, the New Economic Policy and forced collectivisation. The capitalist class disappeared through “redemption” rather than confiscation, and agricultural output grew by about 4 per cent a year even as collectivisation proceeded. But the confidence its success gave Mao, the belief that mass mobilisation could outrun objective conditions, led to a “Chinese road” beyond the Soviet model, the Great Leap Forward. The methods consolidated in the same years, political campaigns, quotas and the redrawing of the line between “the people” and “the enemy”, became the tools of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. 31 62 42 61 25