Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who became the founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he ruled as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. His theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism.
The history of the People's Republic of China is often divided distinctly by historians into the "Mao era" and the "post-Mao era". The country's Mao era lasted from the founding of the People's Republic on 21 September 1949 to Deng Xiaoping's consolidation of power and policy reversal at the Third Plenum of the 11th Party Congress on 22 December 1978. The Mao era focuses on Mao Zedong's social movements from the early 1950s on, including land reform, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
The StateFlag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ; commonly known as the Soviet flag was the official national flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1923 to 1991. The flag's design and symbolism are derived from several sources, but emerged during the Russian Revolution. The flag is also an international symbol of the communist movement as a whole. The nicknames for the flag were The Hammer and Sickle and The Red Banner.
The Great Chinese Famine was a period in the People's Republic of China between the years 1959 and 1961 characterized by widespread famine. Drought, poor weather, and the policies of ruler Mao Zedong contributed to the famine, although the relative weights of the contributions are disputed. Estimates of deaths due to starvation range in the tens of millions.
In politics, a red flag is predominantly a symbol of socialism, communism, Marxism, trade unions, left-wing politics, and historically of anarchism; it has been associated with left-wing politics since the French Revolution (1789–99). Socialists adopted the symbol during the Revolutions of 1848 and it became a symbol of communism as a result of its use by the Paris Commune of 1871. The flags of several communist states, including China, Vietnam and the Soviet Union, are explicitly based on the original red flag. The red flag is also used as a symbol by some democratic socialists and social democrats, for example the League of Social Democrats of Hong Kong, French Socialist Party and the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The Labour Party in Britain used it until the late 1980s. It was the inspiration for the socialist anthem, The Red Flag.
The Sino-Soviet split (1956–1966) was the breaking of political relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), caused by doctrinal divergences that arose from their different interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism, as influenced by their respective geopolitics during the Cold War (1945–1991). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sino-Soviet debates about the interpretation of Orthodox Marxism became specific disputes about the Soviet Union's policies of national de-Stalinization and international peaceful coexistence with the Western world. Against that political background, the international relations of the PRC featured official belligerence towards the West, and an initial, public rejection of the Soviet Union's policy of peaceful coexistence between the Eastern and Western blocs, which Mao Zedong said was Marxist revisionism by the Russian Communists.
The people's commune was the highest of three administrative levels in rural areas of the People's Republic of China during the period from 1958 to 1983 when they were replaced by townships. Communes, the largest collective units, were divided in turn into production brigades and production teams. The communes had governmental, political, and economic functions during the Cultural Revolution. The people's commune was commonly known for the collective activities within them, including labor and meal preparation, which allowed for workers to share local welfare. Though, this also caused the communities of people included in the people's communes to be struck harder by food shortages, and face longer hours than under individual labor.
New Democracy or the New Democratic Revolution is a concept based on Mao Zedong's "Bloc of Four Social Classes" theory in post-revolutionary China which argued originally that democracy in China would take a decisively distinct path to that in any other country. He also said every third world country would have its own unique path to Democracy, given that particular country's own social and materialist conditions. Mao labeled representative democracy in the Western nations as "Old Democracy," characterizing parliamentarianism as just an instrument to promote the dictatorship of the bourgeoise/land owning class through manufacturing consent. He also found his concept of New Democracy in contrast with the Soviet-style Dictatorship of the Proletariat which he figured would soon take over most of the world. Mao spoke about how he wanted to create a New China, a country freed from the feudal and semi-feudal aspects of its old culture as well as Japanese Imperialism. Thus he wanted to create a new culture through Cultural Revolution, a new Economy free from the land owners, and in order to protect these new institutions, a New Democracy of the four revolutionary classes; Peasants, Proletariat, Intelligentsia, and Petit Bourgeoise. He said in the Third World, only these four classes can lead a thorough enough United Front against the Imperialists, as the National Bourgeoise of China must take Counter-revolutionary measures to protect its own feudal practices of slavery through land rent, violently shutting down any anti-imperialist revolutionary movement that threatened the interests of the land owners.
The Lushan Conference was a meeting of the top leaders of the Communist Party of China held between July and August 1959. The Politburo met in an "expanded session" between July 2 and August 1, followed by the 8th Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China from August 2 – 16. The major topic of discussion was the Great Leap Forward.
The Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement was a policy instituted in the People's Republic of China in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result of what he perceived to be pro-bourgeois thinking prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong declared certain privileged urban youth would be sent to mountainous areas or farming villages to learn from the workers and farmers there. In total, approximately 17 million youth were sent to rural areas as a result of the movement.
Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62, is a 2010 book by professor and historian Frank Dikötter about the Great Famine of 1958–1962 in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong (1893–1976).
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine is a book written by Jasper Becker, the Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post. Becker argues that the American press reported the Great Chinese Famine with accuracy, but leftists and communist sympathisers such as Edgar Snow, Rewi Alley, and Anna Louise Strong, remained silent or played down its severity, when Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward had turned into a horrible tragedy. Becker concludes that the tragedy could have been averted after the first year if Mao's senior advisers had dared to confront him.
Crimes against humanity have occurred under various Communist regimes. Actions such as forced deportation, terror, ethnic cleansing, and the deliberate starvation of people such as during the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward have been described as crimes against humanity. In the 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism it was stated that crimes committed under communism were often crimes against humanity, according to the definition developed in the Nuremberg Trials, and that the crimes committed under Communism and National Socialism were comparable. Very few people have been tried for these crimes, although Cambodia has prosecuted members of the Khmer Rouge and Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have passed laws that have led to the prosecution of several perpetrators for crimes against the Baltic peoples. They were tried for crimes committed during the Occupation of the Baltic states in 1940 and 1941, and during the reoccupation after the war. There were also trials for attacks by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) on the Forest Brethren.
Chinese property law has existed in various forms for centuries. After the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, most land is owned by collectivities or by the state; the Property Law of the People's Republic of China passed in 2007 codified property rights.
The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Communist Revolution 1945–1957 is a book by University of Hong Kong historian Frank Dikötter. It is the second book in a trilogy about the history of China under Mao Zedong, based primarily on newly opened government archives, as well as on interviews and memoirs. Dikötter's first book in the series, Mao's Great Famine, covered the period of the Great Leap Forward, whereas The Tragedy of Liberation examines the establishment and first decade of the People's Republic of China.
Li Jingquan was a Chinese Hakka politician and the first Party Committee Secretary of Sichuan following the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Considered by scholars to be one of Mao's most enthusiastic adherents, he took a hard line on land reform in Tibetan areas of Sichuan in 1956 and played a central role in the massive starvation of Chinese citizens in Sichuan province and Chongqing during the Great Leap Forward.
Part of Mao Zedong's land reform during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War and the early People's Republic of China was a campaign of mass killings of landlords in order to redistribute land to the peasant class and landless workers which resulted in millions of deaths. Those killed were targeted on the basis of class rather than ethnicity, therefore terming the campaign "genocide" is incorrect and the neologism "classicide" is more accurate. Class-motivated mass killings continued almost throughout the 30 years of social and economic transformation in Maoist China, resulting in the deaths of 90% to 95% of the what used to be 15 million members of the landlord class in China according to Harry Wu.
The Beidaihe Conference of 1958 was an enlarged meeting held by the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee from August 17 to 30 1958. It also involved a conference of provincial industrial secretaries and other relevant local leaders from the 25th to the 31st.
"On the Great Road", commonly known as We Walk on the Great Road, is a Chinese patriotic song written and composed by Li Jiefeng in 1962 and published the following year. The song alludes to the metaphorical road to development for the Chinese people and state after the disastrous Great Leap Forward, as well as to the Long March undertaken by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party in 1934. We Walk on the Great Road was a popular patriotic songs during the Cultural Revolution, and its optimistic tone and simple lyrics cemented it as one of the most popular and enduring patriotic songs of the era, being ranked by the Chinese National Culture Promotion Association as one of the 124 greatest Chinese musical works. Notably, the song was sung extensively during the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong, and featured prominently in the 50th Anniversary of the People's Republic Parade in 1999.
