China - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 248

North, and turned their troops toward the South. In April they crossed the
Yangtze River and took the Nationalist capital of Nanjing. The Nationalists
retreated first to Guangzhou, which they held until October then to
the island of Taiwan in December. Meanwhile, in Beijing on October 1,
Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic.
Mao moved to consolidate power, putting the battle-tested Communist
cadres (party bureaucrats) into positions of authority. He enlisted the
aid of the other big Communist country, the USSR, signing a treaty of
friendship and cooperation. The Soviets sent thousands of engineers and
agricultural experts. They gave some money, and built many factories
and steel mills. Meanwhile, in neighboring Korea, the North had invaded
the South in June 1950. (Korea had been occupied by the Japanese since
1910, and at the end of World War II the Soviets accepted the Japanese
surrender in the north and the Americans accepted it in the south. The
Soviets soon imposed a Communist government in the north.) However,
by October the United Nations troops had reversed its early defeats and
had advanced nearly to Korea's northern border with China. (Nearly all
the UN troops were American.) The Chinese feared the UN forces would
cross into China; therefore, they intervened with thousands of their own
troops. Meanwhile, on China's west, the Communists invaded Tibet,
which has been effectively independent since the fall of the Empire in 1911.
At home, the Communists at first were moderate, but within a year
began a domestic campaign against their enemies, attacking landlords,
business owners, foreigners, and Christian missionaries. Their land
seizures dated back to the 1930s in Yun'an, but now the process intensified
Peasants were organized into collective farms and later into communes of
five thousand families. Machinery was owned in common, and villages
had quotas of grain to meet. Landlords and wealthy peasants were put
on trial and beaten and humiliated. A million landlords were executed,
and others were sent to “reeducation camps.” Mao next began the Three
Anti and the Five Anti campaigns. The first targeted unreliable govern-
ment officials, and the second targeted businessmen and industry own-
ers. These policies of land reform and eliminating private ownership and
the bourgeoisie copied the Soviet Union policies of the 1930s. Millions of
people were victimized. At their trials, they had to publicly confess and
engage in “self-criticism.”
In 1953 China launched its first Five-Year Plan, modeled after the Soviet
plans. Its twin goals were to increase industry and to collectivize agri-
culture. Within a few years, 90% of the peasants were in communes.