The Legacy Events Index

Chinese History

In China, much of the first half of the 20th century involved a struggle between different political forces to control the country, after Imperial rule collapsed. The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 partly reduced this struggle, as opposing indigenous forces turned to confront, as best they could, Japanese troops. The Japanese occupation was brutal, marked, for example, by the 1937 sack of the city of Nanking, and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.

With the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, civil war broke out between Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forces and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT). In 1948, military advantage passed to the Communists, and in the summer of 1949 the KMT resistance collapsed. The KMT government, with the forces it could salvage, sought refuge on the island of Taiwan. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong, as chairman of the CCP, proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing.

In 1957, Mao and other party leaders abruptly changed course and launched the so-called Antirightist campaign on the critics for harboring rightist ideology. About half a million educated people lost their jobs and often their freedom, usually because of something they had said during the Hundred Flowers period.

Next, in 1957, Mao launched a radical development plan known as the Great Leap Forward in which China would step up industrial output to rival the greatest European producers. In 1958, the CCP combined agricultural collectives into gigantic communes, and millions of peasants and city workers were ordered to abandon their fields and factories in order to run primitive backyard furnaces. Within a couple of years, the Great Leap had proved an economic disaster, and led to a massive famine from 1960 to 1962 in which more than 20 million people died.

In mid-1966, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The announced goals of the revolution were to eradicate the remains of so-called bourgeois ideas and customs and to recapture the revolutionary zeal of early Chinese Communism. He launched an intense public criticism of his rivals and sanctioned the organization of Beijing students into militant groups known as Red Guards. Educated people were singled out for persecution. Overall, men and women were tortured, imprisoned, starved, denied medical treatment, and forced to leave their children unsupervised when they were sent to labor camps in the countryside. Tens of thousands were killed or committed suicide. Finally, the army was called in to restore order, and in July 1968 the Red Guards were sent back to school or to work in the countryside. In the years following the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, China's leaders gradually modified the strict policies of socialist guidance of the economy, which has slightly diminished the state's role in people's daily lives.

Click here for more information from Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2001.

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