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brought them any newfound unity. And where the Nationalists had by that time driven the
country to near bankruptcy, the CCP had instead garnered a strong national following.
On October 1, 1949, Mao at last took center stage, and upon a podium at Tian'anmen
Square he declared the People's Republic of China and Beijing its capital.
The first 5-7 years of Mao's leadership were some of his best. Land was redistributed
and the economy showed signs of improvement. In 1956, however, people got a taste of
what was to come. Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which people were
asked to express their opinions about the government. Those who did raise an objection,
however, were promptly incarcerated. People quickly learned their place, and Mao laid the
foundation for a healthy respect for obedience.
The next challenge to fall on the people's shoulders was the Great Leap Forward of
1958-1960, part of Mao's second Five Year Plan, which aimed to modernize the country. It
was at this time that China really began to set its sights on matching itself with the West (a
goal that is still blatantly apparent today). Mao believed China was capable of surpassing
the economy of the United Kingdom in 15 years and of the United States in 20-30 years. He
believed grain and steel production would be the yardsticks with which to judge this by, so
he set about redistributing land into large communes, and “encouraged” people everywhere
to turn their backyards into furnaces. It's estimated there were about 60,000 such furnaces
around the country. Being run by people who had absolutely no idea about steel produc-
tion, however, meant that almost everything they produced was unusable. When Mao would
make his tours of the country to inspect the progress, people would jump to impress him.
Furnaces and transported crops were fashioned alongside his train route just ahead of him
so that he could see the bountiful gains of his plans. The true result, however, was utter
devastation. Many of the able-bodied people had been sent off to work on steel, so there
was no one left to work the land, and even if there was, they often had no tools to work
with, as these had been melted down or destroyed for steel production. Even many of the
crops that were successfully harvested were sent to Russia rather than fed to the starving
Chinese people who had produced them. China was billions of
rénmínbì
in debt to Rus-
sia, and Mao stubbornly wanted to prove the country's strength by paying it all back in an
agreed period of time. In 1959 China was hit by severe drought, tipping the country into
catastrophe. Crops failed and millions died from starvation. Those who opposed were pun-
ished, and often killed. Figures of those who died from famine or militant killings range
from around 14 million to more than 40 million. Historians such as Yang Jishen (author
of banned book
Tombstone
, one of the most respected accounts of the Great Chinese Fam-
ine) suggests 36 million individuals. Author and producer of
China History Podcast
Laszlo
