From New Democracy to socialist transformation

The Common Programme: the promise of coalition

The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference that met in Beijing in September 1949 included, besides the Communists, the democratic parties such as the Democratic League and the Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee and non-party figures. The Common Programme it adopted made the “people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class” the form of the state while promising protection of national capital, respect for private property and multi-party cooperation. Non-Communists such as Soong Ching-ling became vice-chairs, and Mao’s “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” spelled out the class limits of the coalition. Source 1 · Source 2

The new government’s first tasks were to tame hyperinflation and restore the economy. Chen Yun used state trading companies to control grain and cotton and unified the currency, stabilising prices by spring 1950; by 1952 industrial output had regained its pre-war peak. The mixed economy of these years was state-led but left private business and markets in place, and Mao said the New Democratic stage would last “a fairly long period”. Source 3 · Source 4

Two months in Moscow

In December 1949 Mao made his first trip abroad, to Moscow for Stalin’s seventieth birthday. Stalin wanted to keep the 1945 treaty with the Nationalists and Mao was left virtually idle at a dacha for weeks; only when Zhou Enlai arrived in January did negotiations begin, and the treaty of friendship, alliance and mutual assistance was signed on 14 February. The Soviets promised a $300 million loan and the return of the Changchun railway and Port Arthur by 1952, but required recognition of Mongolia’s independence and privileges in Xinjiang and Manchuria. Source 5 · Source 6

“Leaning to one side” — the Soviet side — was a line Mao had declared in June 1949. The treaty fixed China’s place in the Cold War, and Soviet equipment, technicians and credits went into the 156 key projects of the First Five-Year Plan begun in 1953; the industrial bases of the Northeast, such as the Anshan steelworks and the Changchun automobile plant, were built this way. Mao’s resentment at his treatment by Stalin, however, became part of the personal background of the later Sino-Soviet split. Source 7) · Source 3

Land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries

The Land Reform Law of June 1950 ordered confiscation and division of landlord land in the newly liberated countryside of the south and west. Work teams entered villages, classified households and held “speak bitterness” and “struggle” meetings; landlords were executed, imprisoned or placed under “supervised labour”. By the end of 1952 three hundred million peasants had received 47 million hectares, and an estimated one to two million landlords had been executed. The reform destroyed the old rural power and rooted the party’s organisation at village level. Source 8) · Source 3

The Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries, launched in October 1950 alongside the entry into the Korean War, targeted Nationalist remnants, secret societies and “bandits”. Mao sent execution “quotas” down to the provinces, and public executions at mass rallies peaked in spring 1951; by the official count 710,000 people were executed. The thought-reform campaign demanded that intellectuals criticise themselves and purge their “worship” of America. The war gave every campaign the justification of “protecting the home and defending the country”. Source 9 · Source 10

Three-anti, Five-anti: the subordination of the capitalists

The Three-anti campaign begun at the end of 1951 targeted cadres’ corruption, waste and bureaucratism; the Five-anti of 1952 targeted the capitalists’ bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on contracts and theft of economic information. “Tiger-hunting” meetings at which workers and clerks denounced their employers swept the business communities of Shanghai and Tianjin, and fines and back-taxes transferred company assets to the state; in Shanghai alone suicides ran into the hundreds. Source 11 · Source 3

The Five-anti effectively withdrew the Common Programme’s protection of national capital. Capitalists were sorted into “law-abiding” and “law-breaking” categories, and the state bound private firms to the plan by controlling their supplies and sales. When in 1953 Mao proclaimed in the “general line for the transition period” that socialist industrialisation and transformation would be completed “in ten to fifteen years”, New Democracy was in substance over. Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai had envisaged a slower transition but followed Mao. Source 11 · Source 12

The Gao Gang–Rao Shushi affair

Gao Gang, the “king of the Northeast”, moved to Beijing in 1952 as chairman of the State Planning Commission and read Mao’s displeasure with the moderate line of Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai as a signal about the succession. With the organisation chief Rao Shushi he canvassed the veterans, belittling Liu as a man of the “white areas”, but Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun reported to Mao, who in December 1953 warned against “two headquarters”. Source 13 · Source 14

In February 1954 the Fourth Plenum condemned the two as an “anti-party alliance”; Gao Gang killed himself in August, and Rao Shushi was arrested in 1955 and died in prison in 1975. The affair also touched relations with Moscow: Gao had been close to the Soviet advisers, and Khrushchev later recalled that he had passed information to Stalin. The first leadership purge of the People’s Republic showed that the frame of “two lines within the party” was available to Mao at any time. Source 13 · Source 3

The “socialist high tide”: collectivisation and joint ownership

After land reform the countryside was to move through stages — mutual-aid teams, lower cooperatives (land pooled, dividends paid), higher cooperatives (collective ownership). In summer 1955 Mao’s “On the Question of Agricultural Cooperation” compared cadres who wanted to slow down to “women with bound feet” and ordered a high tide; by the end of 1956, 96 per cent of households were in higher cooperatives. China completed in eighteen months what had taken the Soviet Union five years, and unified grain purchase (1953) and household registration (1958) bound the peasants to the land. Source 3 · Source 7)

In the cities, from late 1955 all private business was converted to “joint state-private” ownership within months. Capitalists surrendered ownership in return for a fixed annual interest of five per cent of assessed assets for ten years, and in Beijing and Shanghai parades were organised to “apply” for conversion to gongs and drums. In September 1956 the Eighth Congress declared transformation complete and “large-scale class struggle” over — a judgement Mao would soon reverse. Source 3 · Source 11

1956: the model completed, the first cracks

The First Five-Year Plan achieved industrial growth of over fifteen per cent a year, and the constitution of 1954, the state apparatus and the planning system were modelled on the Soviet Union. But Khrushchev’s secret speech in February 1956 put the personality cult and the Soviet model itself in question, and in April Mao’s “On the Ten Major Relationships” spoke of a “Chinese road” easing the bias toward heavy industry and central control. The Eighth Congress’s removal of Mao Zedong Thought from the party constitution expressed the same mood. Source 7) · Source 15

The speed of transformation left problems. In the higher cooperatives peasant incentive fell, in 1956–1957 some areas saw demands to withdraw and unrest, and the Hungarian revolution shocked the leadership. Mao proposed to handle the tension as “contradictions among the people” and invited intellectuals to criticise, with the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaign as the result. The confidence and the anxiety of 1956 together prepared the radicalisation of the next decade. Source 16 · Source 17