Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
efforts was to change the thought patterns of people deemed hostile to
the new state but not deserving of the death penalty.
The People's Republic used Soviet models and five-year plans to
achieve its socialist transformation. For its first four years, the People's
Republic of China, or PRC, focused on education, industrialization,
and health care. The first formal Soviet-style-five-year plan, which
extended from 1953 to 1957, continued efforts to improve education
and health care, but it was concerned primarily with improving heavy
industrial and agricultural production. Industrial output steadily
increased during this period, thanks largely to the assistance of Soviet
industrial experts. Agriculture was, however, a different story. Mao
and the more idealistic of the Chinese Communists envisioned an agri-
cultural collectivization scheme under which China's peasants would
combine themselves into agricultural producers' cooperatives (often
abbreviated APCs) of between 40 and 300 households. These coopera-
tives would, they anticipated, pool labor and create much more effi-
cient agriculture. In practice, however, the results of collectivization
were disappointing, and more practically minded national leaders
sought the dissolution of the APCs. The practical camp eventually pre-
vailed over the idealistic camp, and by 1955 several thousand APCs
had been disbanded.
THE HUNDRED FLOWERS CAMPAIGN
Mao and his ideological colleagues viewed these disbandments with
alarm but for a time could do nothing about them. Mao was careful
and deliberate in conducting warfare, but when it came to peacetime
national reconstruction he proved to be an impatient and impetuous
man. He saw the relative peace and prosperity of the 1950s as a step
away from the old revolutionary commitment he had known in the
Long March and Yan'an days. He sat and stewed at the dissolution of
the APCs but could do little about it because he was outvoted in the
Politburo. But votes were not everything, andMao knew quite well that
he was still the dominant personality of the Communist party and had
an enormous reservoir of esteem and good will among the common
people. In early 1957 he published an important essay entitled “On the
Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” in which he
urged those who disagreed with his policies to come forward and offer
constructive criticisms and suggestions. “Let a hundred flowers bloom
and a hundred schools contend” was his message, and it eventually
backfired on him.
