Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
faces or tell if they were unconscious or dead. “This is what happens
to those who resist the Party's authority,” he snapped. “You're a
young student. I'll give you another chance. Tomorrow night come
back and confess fully.” Terribly shaken by the glimpse of those who
had apparently resisted reform, I returned to my slot on the kang
[bed]. I had no idea what I would say at the next session. I knew
only that if my answers sounded false or incomplete I too would be
hanging from the interrogation room ceiling. I didn't sleep at all that
night.
(Wu 1994, 49-50)
NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION EFFORTS, 1949-1956
The end of the Korean War brought some stability and normalcy to
China for the next few years. Ultimately, however, Mao became con-
cerned because China was getting down to the practical tasks of peace-
time reconstruction and rational economic planning and seemed no
longer to possess the ideological focus and revolutionary ardor of pre-
liberation days. Longing to see China realize his revolutionary objec-
tives before his own death, Mao attempted to propel China quickly
along the revolutionary path to socialism. In this he was excessively
theoretical and idealistic and ignored the real-world on-the-ground
consequences of his adventurism. As a result, China was plunged into
two decades of chaos and turmoil. From 1956 until his death in 1976,
Mao more or less had his way with China and set the cause of modern-
izing his country back 20 years. In retrospect it is clear that Mao was a
fine fighter and theoretician but largely a failure as a practical peace-
time leader. Mao's contributions to China essentially ended with liber-
ation in 1949.
The first decade of the People's Republic started out well enough. The
Korean War was a brief but significant interruption to China's plans for
domestic reconstruction and political consolidation. Even during the
Korean War, however, some reforms proceeded. Positive reforms
included the land reform program of confiscating all farmland and
redistributing it to landless peasants and reform of marriage law, which
outlawed concubinage and polygamy and made it easier for women to
obtain divorces. Negative development included a nationwide
roundup and execution of more than 500,000 “counterrevolutionaries”
(basically anyone deemed hostile to the new Communist regime,
including former Nationalist officials and people who had voiced
disapproval of what the Communists were doing) and new “reform
through labor” techniques that employed backbreaking physical labor
and subtle psychological torture. The object of reform-through-labor
