A summary of Modern Chinese history from 1644 to 1900, from the Qing to the Present
In the late 1500s, the Manchu clan in Manchuria (northern China) formed a unified force, and in 1636 the region declared a new dynasty, the Qing, and declared independence within its northern enclave from the Ming dynasty to the South. In 1644, peasant rebels from rural China led by Li Zicheng invaded the capital of the Ming dynasty. The Ming, in desperation, made an alliance with the northern Manchus and their “Qing Dynasty” and opened the Shanghai Pass so that Prince Dorgon of the Manchus could lead his Banner Armies down to the capital. Once there, Prince Dorgon defeated the peasant rebels and Li Zicheng—but then he seized the capital from the Ming. The rest of the Ming dynasty to the south, and revolts from lords of three different fiefdoms in China led by Wu Sangui, delayed the consolidation of the Manchu’s Qing Dynasty over all of China for several decades, during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing dynasty, who ruled from 1661 to 1722. But by the Kangxi emperor’s death, rebelling provinces were subdued, and China was under Qing control, and relatively stable and prosperous after years of war.
After the death of the Kangxi Emperor, the hard-working Yongzheng Emperor ruled for about ten years from 1723 to 1735, a period of peace and prosperity with a crackdown on corruption and reform of the financial administration, with the creation of the Qing Grand Council, a policy-making body that initially controlled military affairs but later basically became the advisory board to the emperor. After his death, the Qianlong Emperor would rule for nearly sixty years from 1735 to 1796. The Chinese population grew during this time, and the Qianlong emperor engaged in military conquest to conquer Central Asian kingdoms and inner China during the “Ten Great Campaigns” from the 1750s to the 1790s. The British visited the court of the Qianlong emperor in 1793 when the Qing was at its peak and were impressed by the pomp and dignity of the court and the Emperor. Contacts with foreigners declined during this time, as the Qing court was uninterested in trade with Westerners, while Christianity was banned. During this time, social mores were very conservative. People were required to wear “queues” (the Qing hairstyles), and footbinding was popular for women. At this time, there was a “dual system of administration” where officials were appointed on the basis of civil service examination success, and were rotated around to avoid favoritism, and each position was held jointly by a Manchu official and a Han Chinese official.
Near the end of the Qianlong emperor’s reign, the Qing dynasty began to have some problems. The Qianlong emperor’s favorite in the 1790s, an official named Heshen, was extremely corrupt and diverted vast sums of tax monies that were supposed to be used to stop flooding and upkeep canals and dams, or supposed to be used for war, for himself. There were also rising rice prices and starvation. In 1794, hundreds of thousands of rebels part of the secret religious society the White Lotus Society engaged in a tax protest that then became a rebellion. The rebellion was crushed, but it diminished the prestige of the Qing and the Qing was forced to spend more tax money on defeating the rebels. Previous Qing emperors had kept taxes low at a fixed rate, or reduced taxes, but this became a problem as the population kept rising and it was difficult to provide public services for everyone. The Qianlong Emperor’s son, the Jiaqing Emperor, took over in 1799 and had the corrupt official Heshen removed from office.
Meanwhile, the Jiaqing emperor had to contend with a new threat: the smuggling of opium into the country. The British East India Company (a company which the British Empire had granted a trading monopoly in Asia and India and eventually ended up essentially ruling India) wanted Chinese tea, but they had to pay for it with silver since China didn’t want any of their goods, and their silver coffers were rapidly emptying. So they began sponsoring independent traders to smuggle opium into China in return for silver, fueling a growing addiction. The British East India Company was initially restricted by the Canton system. The Qianlong emperor and then the Jiaqing emperor both imposed the “Canton System”, first implemented in 1757, as a way to control foreign trade by focusing all trade on the southern port of Canton (under supervision of the Guangdong Customs Supervisor). China attempted to restrict the importation of opium, banning it in 1799, but to no avail: smuggling continued. Then, in 1839, the situation went from bad to worse. The Jiaqing Emperor had been replaced by the Daoguang Emperor, who rejected proposals to legalize and tax opium, instead choosing to completely ban all trade in opium and crackdown on opium smugglers. Under his orders, foreign traders’ opium was confiscated without compensation, and the foreign traders were forcibly confined to the foreign quarters. The United Kingdom in response went to war with China, sparking the First Opium War from 1839-1842. At the end of the war, the Qing were forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing also known as the Treaty of Nanking—the first of what the Chinese later called the unequal treaties—which paid the British back for the financial losses of the opium confiscation, guaranteed extraterritoriality (basically provided that British citizens need not be tried in Chinese courts or be forced to abide by Chinese laws), opened five new ports to foreign merchants, contained the “most favored nation clause” (according to this clause, if China signed a treaty with another country, the provisions would also apply to Britain), and ceded Hong Kong Island to the British Empire.
After this, in the 1850s, Western imperialism was rapidly expanding. The Qing was also under threat from the Nian Rebellion from 1851-1868. It originated in Shandong and Jiangsu provinces in northern China, with bandit gangs growing and plundering villages; dykes along the Yellow River broke down causing flooding but the government was unable to respond. The bandit gangs loosely united and attacked Qing forces; they simply wanted regional autonomy, not to take over the dynasty. Qing troops had difficulty putting down the threat since it was a guerilla war. The Nian rebellion was eventually put down by Li Hongzhang, a bureaucrat under the Qing who took the Huai army and used it to defeat the Nian rebels.
In the midst of the rebellion, the British made further demands of the Qing: namely, that all of China be opened to British traders, the opium trade be legalized, foreign imports be exempted from internal duties or tariffs, the Chinese government suppress piracy, and permission be granted for a British ambassador to reside in Beijing. When the Chinese government appeared unwilling, Britain used the excuse of an incident in 1856 where the Chinese government captured a pirate ship that was registered as a British ship, and Britain, soon aided by France, went to war against China in the Second Opium War of 1856-1860. The first part of the war ended in 1958 with the four treaties of Tientsin, giving Britain, France, Russia and the U.S. access to ten new treaty ports, the right to freely navigate on the Yangtze River, the right to travel to the interior of China, the right to establish embassies in the closed city of Paking, and granting a small bit of northern territory to Russia through the separate Treaty of Aigin to Russia. The Chinese then had a change of heart and went on the defensive again, but the English and French forces then marched to Beijing, and destroyed the beautiful and wondrous Summer Palace of the Xianfeng Emperor, who fled leaving his brother Prince Gong in charge. The British also almost destroyed the famous and ancient Forbidden City. The war ended with, in addition to the previous concessions, the Convention of Beijing also granting “freedom of religion” in China so Christian missionaries could proselytize, permission for British to carry indentured Chinese to America, and legalization of the opium trade. The Opium Wars were a terrible blow, as the outnumbered (by 10 to 1) British and French defeated the Chinese and caused the Emperor to flee.
At the same time as the Qing was fighting the British and the Nian rebellion to the North, they had to contend with a rebellion that almost overthrew the dynasty: the Taiping Revolution (1850-1864). It was led by Hong Xiuquan, a man who had failed the civil service bureaucracy examinations (around this time it was getting harder to get a post as the number of positions wasn’t keeping pace with population growth), who had after his failure had a feverous vision believing he was Jesus’ younger brother, sent to purify China and convert it into the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. He amassed many followers, declared a holy war against the Qing, marched north and would likely have defeated the Qing in 1853 had he not decided to retrench and stay at his capital of Nanjing, where his armies preyed on local rural peasants to feed themselves. This was the largest rebellion in Chinese history. It was originally aimed against local elites but later against the Qing’s strict moral code, promoting instead a blend of Christianity and Confucianism. Peasant support faltered because the Taiping army began looting the land surrounding Nanjing, and after Hong’s death the system broke down. Finally Zeng Guofan established the Xian Army, previously a local army in Hunan, to defeat the rebellion by gradually turning back the Taiping in the west. Zeng Guofan was a Confucian scholar and bureaucrat from Hunan who established the Xian army to help provincial governors; his soldiers were personally loyal to gentry commanders loyal to Zeng, and his army was disciplined, well trained, and well fed—though it was supposed to be disbanded when rebels defeated, it stayed around and became a real army for the Qing, but this led to decentralization of control of the military, which would have implications for the Qing in the future. The Taiping Rebellion had immense casualties, with 20 (many estimates are higher) million people dying. After its end, Zeng Guofan and his proteges including Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang were adulated as saviors of the Qing.
The Tongzhi Emperor reigned from 1861 to 1875, while he was an adolescent. The Tongzhi Emperor came to the throne as an infant in 1862, and his aunt the Dowager Empress Cixi ruled for him along with the powerful Prince Gong. Prince Gong implemented sweeping reforms to restore “good Confucian government”, including tax relief, grain relief, water control projects, attacking corruption in government, and giving provincial leaders more power to deal with local problems. This was known as the “Tongzhi Restoration.” This also went hand-in-hand with the “Self Strengthening” Movement, reforms in the provinces from 1862-1895; among its proponents were Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang. Local leaders wanted to end foreign nations’ power that came from wealth from industrialization, and believed that China had to industrialize—“use the tools of the barbarians (i.e., Western technology) to defeat the barbarians and protect superior Chinese culture”. The goal of the movement was to revitalize the Chinese government with reforms such as the development of the Zongli Yamen (a foreign ministry to deal with international affairs), restoration of regional power, modernization of armies and railroads, and increased industry and commerce imposed over a period of peace during the 1860s. However, the Self Strengthening Movement was not truly successful because of weak support from the central government, and because Chinese society and infrastructure was not well-equipped for industrialization. Foreign investors ended up taking over most factories, and the movement collapsed especially after the death of the Tongzhi Emperor in 1875.
When the young Tongzhi emperor died, the Guanxu emperor came to the throne at age 4 in 1875. One reformer at this time was Liang Qichao, a reformist philosopher who would become famous for later suggesting that China was not defined by the Qing, but was a nation: loyalty should be to nation, not dynasty, laying the foundation for the nationalist movement that would later be developed by the Guomindang and Sun Yat-Sen. He was also an advocate of constitutional monarchy, and put his ideas on paper along with another prominent reformist, Kang Youwei, to be sent to the Guangxu Emperor. In 1898, the Guangxu Emperor, who had by then come of age, agreed with these scholars and called on them to draft reforms: he decided to unveil an edict implementing these reforms, and continued to implement so over the next 100 days (the 100 Days Reform), but Empress Dowager Cixi and a cohort of conservatives (advocates of Confucian traditionalism) in the Qing court and military thwarted these reforms. Empress Cixi forced the young emperor to abdicate in her favor, with General Yuan Shikai placing the emperor under house arrest, and the reformists who had been allies of the young emperor being persecuted by the army. All of the reforms were repealed, except the creation of Beijing University (which would later be central to the intellectual flowering of the May 4th Movement in 1919 which helped spark the Communist Party), although some others were re-adopted later in years to come. Empress Cixi then ruled from 1898 to her death twenty years later in 1908.
Five years later, in 1895, the Qing government of China faced war as Japan went to war with China over the question of who would control Korea. They lost the war, resulting in China’s General Li Hongzhang signing a humiliating peace treaty, the Treaty of Shimonoseki, to Prime Minister of Japan Count Ito Hirobumi paying reparations and ceding Taiwan (Formosa) to Japan. They also lost Korea as a tributary state, and Japan took control of the Korean peninsula. As a consequence of the defeat, General Li Hongzhang was replaced by General Yuan Shikai.
The 1800s in China was a period of time where the Qing faced a series of humiliating blows, imperialist aggression, and internal rebellion. The Chinese would later refer to the period from 1839 to 1949, the period of intervention and imperialism by foreign powers and Japan, as the Century of Humiliation or the Hundred Years of Humiliation. During this period and at the beginning of the next century, Europeans began to carve out Spheres of Influence in China. Originally these were in in reparation for German missionaries murdered in China. These powers carved out areas (the “Spheres of Influence”) where either 1 European country, the US, or Japan would have primary influence or control but still open access. This caused many Chinese to believe that China would eventually disappear or become a series of colonies, which laid the ground work for the rise of the Nationalist and Communist movements in the next few years. In 1911, just a decade after the dawn of the new century, the Qing dynasty would finally fall after years of decline.
A summary of Modern Chinese history since 1900
In 1900, there was the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-foreign, anti-Christian, anti-colonial uprising against the foreign “Spheres of Influence” and Christian missionaries in Beijing. The (Manchu) Qing dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi (who had basically taken over from the Guangxu Emperor who had tried to implement reforms in 1889 and put him under house arrest) supported the Boxers against the Eight-Nation Alliance of American, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Russians. Some Qing officials disagreed however, and refused to fight, because the Qing had lost the first Sino-Japanese War against Japan just five years before. The Qing dynasty lost the Boxer Rebellion war, and ended up having to pay indemnities to foreign powers according to the Boxer Protocol. Some nations used some of the money as scholarships to send Chinese to Western schools. Meanwhile, after this decisive defeat the Empress Cixi implemented the New Policies Reform or Late Qing Reform to try and save the dynasty. The New Policies created a theoretical shift to constitutional monarchy, military/education/political reform copying the west, abolishing the examination system in 1905, destroying the ability of the government to control what education should consist of, and cutting the link between social elites and the government. However, Cixi then died in 1908, so a child, the boy emperor Puyi, was then installed by officials as the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty.
Puyi and the Qing were overthrown following the “Rights Recovery Movement” in 1911, after merchant elites bought railway tracks from foreigners, but then the Qing government foolishly chose to nationalize the railroad industry and borrowed money from foreign investors to do so (basically giving control/power to the foreigners in the form of being indebted to them). This led to railway riots. Meanwhile, a cell within the military was planning to revolt anyway and was spurred into action by the riots, leading to successive revolts in the provinces (the Xinhai Revolution of 1911) and the ousting of the Qing. Sun Yat-sen was selected to lead the new government, a Republic. Sun Yat-Sen had been a founding member of the Revolutionary Alliance, and a tireless fighter for reform and freedom of China from imperialist aggression. Sun Yat-sen became leader of a new political party, the Guomindang or Chinese Nationalist Party. Meanwhile, Yuan Shikai had been a general under the Qing—he came out of retirement and made a deal with the revolutionaries that he would convince the Qing dynasty to give up if he got to be President in the new Republic. Therefore, Sun Yat-sen resigned. However, during the first election, the Kuomintang (Sun Yat-Sen’s party) won, and the GMD/KMT (Guomindang/Kuomintang) party chairman Song Jiaoren was then murdered by Yuan’s government. Sun Yat-sen fled the country to Japan in 1913, calling for a new revolution against the authoritarian Yuan Shikai and his government.
Yuan Shikai crushed the new revolt, consolidating his power and ending the brief democracy of the new “Republic”. Two years later, however, in 1915, World War 1 was breaking out in Europe. China had previously supported the Allies fighting against Germany in the war on the condition that they would be able to keep former German colony areas (specifically the Shandong peninsula, an area in eastern China bordering the sea and close to Korea). However, Japan meanwhile allied itself with the British in the war against Germany; it then occupied the German sphere of influence in Manchuria (northern China) and Shandong. Japan sent China’s government 21 Demands, threatening military action if Yuan’s government didn’t sign. The demands would essentially make Manchuria a Japanese colony and make China a vassal state of Japan. Yuan Shikai decided to sign, except for Article V which would involve posting military advisors in the interior of China. This decision on the part of the Chinese government led to riots on May 17, known as National Humiliation Day; the Chinese public also boycotted Japanese goods, and the US and Great Britain were displeased by Japan’s actions—Japan meanwhile thought them hypocrites, since they seemed to be okay with European imperialism. At the same time, Yuan Shikai had himself declared emperor as the Hongxian Emperor. Yuan Shikai’s closest supporters, the military Beiyang clique who all trained at the same military academy, were displeased and some left to create their own factions. Yunnan’s military governor, Cai E, then rebelled followed by the governor of Guizhou and Guangxi. Yuan then renounced his role as emperor, but he soon thereafter died in 1916.
Following Yuan Shikai’s death, Li Yuanhong briefly tried and failed to revive the Republic by recalling the 1913 legislators, in contrast to general Zhang Zun who tried in 1917 to restore the Qing dynasty by reinstating Puyi. China then descended into a period of warlordism, wherein politicians at the center were weak and essentially relied on the support of strong regional warlords to stay in power. To elaborate on how this came about, in the beginning President Li Yuanhong was locked in conflict with Prime Minister Duan Qirui, eventually dismissing the Prime Minister in 1917. But then the Prime Minister got the Beiyang militarists to join him and eight provinces declared independence. Policy-wise Duan supported Japan and advocated severing ties with Japans’ enemy Germany. Li Yuanhong, unsure what to do, called in General Xhang Xun, who then tried to restore the Manchus, but the Beiyang generals and Duan ended up defeating Li Yuanhong and General Xhang Xun. At this juncture, however, China was in essence still divided, with the south and various provinces not following under Duan’s sphere of power. Meanwhile, the Progressive Party under Liang Qichao advocated for Chinese nationalism and reform, but as Germany began to lose the war came to agree with Duan that China should join the allies against Germany. Duan’s government did, in fact, end up joining with the Allies and declaring war on Germany in 1917. Duan then held elections for a new assembly to consolidate his power, though five provinces in the south chose not to take part. He led the Anhui Clique which controlled the political party the Anfu Club. This group stayed in power until 1920. His northern government, the Beiyang government based in Beihing, had to compete with a southern government, though it had the international legitimacy. However, various Beiyang generals were constantly vying for power.
A lot was going on in 1918-1919, during the time of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the Great War (World War 1). Duan’s government was trying to gain money to fund his army, so he negotiated the Nishihara Loans, a secret treaty with Japan in 1918 promising Japan the right to station troops in Shandong and build two new Shandong railroads, in return for Japanese loans. However, there was infighting over the proper method of reunification with the south of China within the Beiyang clique, and Duan was deposed as Prime Minister though several military leaders were still loyal to him. He was in conflict with President Feng Guozhang, another member of the Beiyang clique, who didn’t want to invade the South, unlike Duan. However, meanwhile the Chinese ambassador abroad in Paris at the Treaty of Versailles convention demanded the promised return of Shandong to China, refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles-- but Japan prevailed and China was forced to reaffirm that Japan could keep Shandong.
Right at this same time, in 1919, rumors of Duan’s secret dealings with Japan combined with China’s inability to retain Shandong in the Treaty of Versailles came to the surface, and there was the May Fourth movement, in which Beijing University students protested against imperialism in general and specifically against the Beiyang government’s weak response to the treaty of Versailles. Lu Xun, a Chinese satirical writer who helped popularize written vernacular Chinese, was important in the May 4th movement. He called for educated Chinese youth to bring about change; the movement also involved many Communist intellectuals. Lu Xun wrote many short stories subtlely critical of Chinese’s passivity and denial in the face of imperialism, and criticizing China’s unwillingness to change and focus on progress rather than remaining a stagnant, Confucian traditionalist society. Cai Yuanpei was also important as the Chancellor of Beijing University beginning in 1917, a scholar successful in the civil service exam who brought in intellectuals to the university, and who joined the “Revolutionary Alliance” or Tongmenghui, which was Sun Yat-Sen’s underground group of revolutionaries opposed to Yuan Shikai’s government. Chen Duxiu, dean of arts and letters at Beijing University, actually failed the civil service exam, but he helped found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and founded New Youth, a journal that was critical of the changing political atmosphere in China. Meanwhile, Hu Shi was a philosophy professor who disagreed with Chen Duxiu, advocating not revolution but a slower step by step approach. Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen was advocating for his Three People’s Principles (which still today dominate political philosophy in Taiwan): People’s Nationalism (anti-imperalism), People’s Rights (sometimes translated as democracy), and People’s Livelihood (sometimes translated as socialism). All these intellectuals and protesting student were in a ferment during the May 4th movement in 1919 at Beijing University, giving rise to the Chinese Communist Party, which was founded in 1921, largely by Chen Duxiu and Chinese intellectual Li Dazhao
In 1920, infighting in the government between warlords came to a head and the Zhili political clique fought against Duan’s Anhui clique of military leaders. This conflict took place during four days in July, and Duan was beaten by the Zhili clique and fled to Japan. A new treaty was then signed in 1922 giving Shandong back to the Chinese, but the Japanese retained rights to build and develop, especially with regards to railroads, in Shandong. The Zhili clique gave Shandong to an Anhui clique warlord after he promised to stay neutral. But there was still more infighting, between a faction of the Zhili clique led by Zhang Zoulin (the Fengtian clique) and the rest of the Zhili clique. The Anhui clique warlords retained some power as one was even appointed premier in 1920. Next, the Zhili-Fengtian war took place, and Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian clique was victorious but surprisingly then named Duan Qirui (previously leader of the Anhui clique who had fled to Japan) to be chief executive in 1924! During all of this northern infighting, Sun Yat-Sen and his Kuomingtang/ Guomindang or Chinese Nationalist Party retained power in the south. Sun Yat-Sen around this time did some negotiating with the north: he demanded of Duan that unequal treaties with foreign parties be repudiated, and a new national assembly be created, if the north wanted reunification. Duan agreed to create a new national assembly, but he couldn’t discard the unequal treaties as the foreigners would only recognize Duan’s regime as legitimate if he upheld the treaties. Sun Yat-Sen then died in 1925 and any negotiations with the northern warlords fell apart. Sun Yat-Sen, right before his death, had also formulated some plans for a military expedition to reunify China (the “Northern Expedition”).
At this point, the Guomindang/Kuomintang continued on, following the plans of Sun Yat-Sen, but opting for the Northern expedition rather than negotiation. The Communist Party of China, established in Beijing in 1921 with founding members including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, was also still around at this time and was organizing. In 1926, the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang (KMT) decided to form an alliance, creating the First United Front, in order to end warlordism in China and defeat the northern warlords. They set out in 1926 on the Northern Expedition. The CCP wanted to spread communism, but the KMT wanted to control communism from within. They KMT also had agreed to ally with the Communists because their ally the Soviet Union (which Sun Yat-Sen negotiated an alliance with in 1923) had wanted them to do so. The First United Front was unsustainable and the General of the KMT, Chiang-Kai Shek (also known as Jiang Jieshi), decided to purge the Communists halfway through the Northern Expedition. Left-wing members of the KMT, the Wuhan faction with their seat in Wuhan, in 1927 had planned to secretly arrest Chiang Kai-Shek. He responded by leading his National Revolutionary Army (NRA) to engage in the Shanghai Purge of 1927, or the April 12 incident. Communist union workers in Shanghai had overthrown the warlords of the Zhili clique, occupying Shanghai, and looting the foreign quarter briefly demanding the return of international settlements to Chinese control. Consequently, the KMT cracked down, declaring martial law and denouncing the Wuhan government’s policy of cooperating with CCP, attacking union workers and disarming Communist militias. More than 10,000 communists were arrested and executed in 20 days. The left wing of the KMT denounced Chiang Kai-Shek, including Sun Yat-Sen’s widow, but its Wuhan government soon disintegrated leaving Chiang Kai-Shek fully in charge of the KMT; the Soviet Union in response ended its alliance with the KMT. Over 300,000 people were killed during “suppression of Communists” campaigns. Chen Duxiu, an intellectual from the May 4th movement and ally of Sun Yat-Sen, was also fired from leadership for sympathizing with the communists. As the purge was happening, Chiang Kai-Shek successfully subdued the Beiyang Government (the northern warlords), taking control of Beijing in 1928. The Kuomintang was then recognized as the legitimate government of China internationally. This was the beginning of the “Nanjing Decade” (1927/1928-1937), after Chiang Kai-Shek took over Nanjing from the Zhili clique warlords and declared it the nationalist government’s capital.
Also, in 1927, was the Autumn Harvest Uprising, in which Mao Zedong led an insurrection in Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, leading a peasant army against the Kuomintang. The uprising was defeated, with Mao retreating to the border between Hunan and Jiangxi in the mountains; this marked a shift in strategy toward a rural-based strategy with guerilla tactics, and paved the way for the creation of the Jiangxi soviet and the Long March of 1934.
The theater of conflict now shifted from South (Sun Yat-Sen’s GMD/KMT) vs. North (Beiyang clique/ northern warlords) to Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang vs. the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Within the Communist Party, ideological changes were afoot. The 28 Bolsheviks, a group of students who studied at the Sun Yat-Sen University in Moscow essentially controlled the CCP Politburo from 1930 to 1935 and represented the Soviet Comintern line of thought. They tried to control rural soviets, which led to party members losing faith in the central leadership. Mao Zedong meanwhile led a large group of Communists to create their own mini-state, the Jiangxi Soviet (1931-1934), in an area to the South of China near the area of the Autumn Harvest Uprising surrounded by mountains and hard for Chiang Kai-Shek’s extermination campaigns to succeed in. They passed a land law taking land from landlords and gentry and redistributing it to the poor/middle class peasants, and passing marriage laws giving rights to women. These measures, especially land reform, brought them support from rural peasants. However, in 1934 Chiang Kai-Shek devised his fifth (and successful) extermination campaign, which basically encircled and trapped the Jiangxi soviet. The Red army troops and party members left the Jiangxi soviet base heading for Yenan (Northern Shangxi, a province in the north of China) in what would become known as the Long March. In this legendary escape, troops faced hunger, sickness and attack and only 10% of the Communists survived the march to Yenan. During this time, the Red Army became more loyal and unified and the 28 Bolsheviks were pushed out of power to be replaced by Mao, while Mao and the CCP gained an increased mythos among the peasants.
Meanwhile, in 1934 Chiang Kai-Shek implemented the New Life Movement, which was composed of a combination of Confucian virtues and Christian values; the goal was to militarize the Chinese people to sacrifice for the nation. In many ways it was the complete opposite of the May 4th movement and a complete failure. It showed how Sun Yat-Sen’s ideology had been abandoned in favor of essentially fascism (although Chiang Kai-Shek had tried to portray himself as Sun Yat-Sen’s successor in order to increase his legitimacy), and made Communism look more attractive.
While this CCP vs. KMT fighting was taking place, Japan was getting all imperialist and aggressive again while WW2 was looming over the horizon. Japan essentially invaded Manchuria in 1931, and set up a puppet state, Manchukuo, under the deposed Qing emperor Puyi. Chiang Kai-Shek was too focused on crushing the Communists to properly defend against the Japanese, however. The Communists were, by contrast, relatively more focused on helping the local peasants against the northern threat from Japan, which won them more popular support from the peasants and the populace at large. In 1936, in what was known as the Xi’an Incident, Chiang Kai Shek’s northern general Zhang Xueliang and his troops, outraged at Japanese aggression in the north, decided to take Chiang Kai-Shek prisoner and only release him when he agreed to a Second United Front between the Communists and the KMT to defend against the Japanese. Once free, Chiang Kai-Shek put Zhang Xueliang on house arrest essentially for life. But, he did agree to a ceasefire and opened the Second United Front. The Japanese, meanwhile, built up their troops on the border and surrounded Beijing and Tianjin. In 1937, during the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (exact cause of opening of hostilities unknown, probably due to a misunderstanding) Japanese troops opened fire on a nearby Chinese town. This led to higher tensions, followed shortly by a full-scale invasion of Japan, the second Sino-Japanese war. The Japanese soon captured Beijing (then called Beiping because it wasn’t the capital, Nanjing was), and then Shanghai. They then captured the capital Nanjing in 1937, and engaged in the horrific massacre/rape/looting known as the Rape of Nanjing. The Chinese government fled to Chongqing in the interior, and the war reached a stalemate with Chinese victories in 1939 in Changsha and Guangxi while Chinese communist forces in Shaanxi fought a guerilla war and war of sabotage against the Japanese. The Japanese just didn’t have the manpower to control the vast countryside of China. In 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US and USSR allied with China and the war merged with other conflicts of WW2. In 1944 Japan conquered Henan and Changsha, but the Chinese still didn’t surrender. China launched counteroffensives and retook West Hunan and Guangxi. Japan eventually surrendered despite still occupying parts of China, after the Allied bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the USSR’s invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria. Over 4 million Chinese and Japanese soldiers died during the war.
Around this time (1941-1944), the Communists staying in Yan’an or Yenan also undertook something known as the Rectification Movement, where party members studied the writings of Mao Zedong and engaged in self-criticism and reflection. The purpose was to purify the party of Mao’s opponents and critics, while educating the masses. The purges carried out by rectification within the CCP led to thousands of deaths, but also consolidated the power of Mao by making Mao Zedong Thought synonymous with party ideology in the eyes of many cadres.
In 1944, the U.S. re-established an official relationship with China. The members of the “Dixie Mission” noted growing CCP membership and mass mobilization through tax/rent reductions and land reform plus encouraging peasants to speak out. The U.S. had previously wanted to see if it could help the CCP fight against Japan, and the Dixie Mission thought the CCP was more effective than Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists although the U.S. officially sided with the GMD/KMT. The U.S. government, however, saw communists as part of a monolithic bloc with the Soviet Union; the people who went on the Dixie Mission were thus branded as communists or communists sympathizers, and the U.S. lost a generation of China specialists.
After the war, the CCP and KMT were poised to start fighting again. The Marshall Mission took place from 1945-1947: George Marshall, a US General who helped lead a Chinese/US counteroffensive in Burma, attempted to negotiate a ceasefire between CCP and GMD, but the agreements the mission established failed because there was no one to enforce them. The failed negotiations resulted in a large-scale civil war between the two groups from 1945-1949, a continuation of the previous conflict from 1927-1937 before the Japanese invasion. Although the KMT was theoretically larger in number and better equipped, the Communists won the civil war! This showed the weakness of the KMT/GMD, with corruption within the top level of the government, hyperinflation due to excessive printing of money, and their actions such as arresting/executing members of the CCP and student protestors which lost them the support of the urban middle class. It showed the power of the CCP because their anti-Japanese activity and land reform led to a large support base from the population especially the peasantry; the CCP generally had better military tactics than the GMD. In October 1, 1949, the victorious Communists formed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with Mao Zedong as Chairman of the party, and forced Chiang Kai-Shek’s Republic of China (ROC) to retreat to Taiwan.
Right after that, 1950-1953, was the Korean War, wherein the United States in its attempt to contain Communism in North Korea ended up getting too close to the Chinese border, and China fought back, with the final borders between North and South Korea ending up drawn where they are today. At the same time, the CCP initiated massive land reform in China. While the land redistribution was taking place, peasants were encouraged to “Speak Bitterness”, expressing their anger and sorrow about old injustices where landlords or employers were placed on public trial, and tenant farmers could confront those who had wronged them in these ‘people’s courts’.
In 1951, there was the ideological Three-anti Campaign (anti-corruption, anti-waste, and anti-bureaucracy), aimed at former KMT members, members of the CCP, and bureaucratic officials who weren’t party members. In 1952, there was the ideological “Five Anti” campaign to target the capitalist class/bourgeoisie: anti-bribery, anti-theft of state property, anti-tax evasion, anti-cheating on government contracts, anti-stealing state information. During the “Anti” campaigns, media encouraged compliance, cadres spied on citizens’ business affairs, activists went to visit business leaders, criticism of business leaders was encouraged, and several thousands were killed, sent to labor camps, or simply scared or made to pay fines. In 1953, the government initiated the First Five Year plan (1953-1957). The plan was based on the Soviet model of economy, with the government bringing many Soviet Union advisors to the area; urban areas focused on heavy industry (steel, iron, concrete), while rural areas experienced gradual collectivization for higher levels of production. Economic reconstruction was relatively successful under the first five year plan: the industrial economy grew; there was greater production; cooperatives ended private ownership and brought a higher standard of living (better land, medical care, housing and education); and the reforms gave state greater control over production. From 1955-56, Mao rushed collectivization, trying to make a rapid transition into socialism, via the Collectivization Movement—which was supported by local party members but not as much by the central leadership as collectivization was a bottom-up movement. Cooperatives went from 15% production in 1955 to over 80% in 1956; greater peasant support; ended private ownership and introduced communes.
Around this time, mid-‘50s (1956-1957), there was also the “Sino-Soviet split” between the USSR and China because of doctrinal divergences due to the countries’ different interpretations of Marxism-Leninism. There had been a gentler split earlier after the Long March went the Chinese Communist Party became a Maoist rather than USSR-led party, but this meant the end of the an alliance between the two countries.
From 1956-1957, Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong proposed the “Hundred Flowers Campaign”. This encouraged intellectuals to give suggestions/critiques to the party; at first, intellectuals were cautious but after an encouraging speech from Mao, criticism poured out from students and writers. This speech was “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”, a 1957 speech by Mao that said the CCP was not infallible and had to be responsible to the people, and stated that class struggle was based on conscious thought. In this speech, Mao said that the masses were inherently good/infallible (legitimizing criticism of the party), with the corollary that because Mao spoke for the people, he was infallible. However, everyone who critiqued the party was labeled for the Anti-Rightist Campaign from 1957-1959 which immediately followed the Hundred Flowers Campaign, causing greater tensions between the intellectuals of the country and the party. This campaign purged alleged “rightists” from the CCP, leading to political persecution of 550,000 people.
Immediately following, from 1958-1962, was the infamous and disastrous “Great Leap Forward”. Huge communes were formed, people worked together to build new industrial backyard furnaces (which didn’t work very well because they were too small), melting down their woks (household frying pans) to provide iron for steel, unrealistic productivity quotas were reported, people were overenthusiastic in promoting industrial production and in some cases didn’t work the fields because they were building big industrial projects or other campaigns, USSR foreign aid was not distributed because of the recent Sino-Soviet split, and in the end the result was a terrible famine that claimed the lives of 45 million (!!!!!!!!!) Chinese. Household registration systems prevented villagers from leaving their villages, and enemies of the state were allocated the least food. The “Winds of Exaggeration” referred to the inflated statistics of grain production during the Great Leap Forward; competition between communes wanting to look successful even though the Great Leap had failed combined with taxes based on the harvest estimates in a deadly combination, so the state kept most of the grain produced because they said more had been produced than actually had—which left less for the masses resulting in starvation.
During the Great Leap, the Lushan Plenum was called in 1959 where the only person to openly criticize the Great Leap Forward was Marshall Peng Dehuai. Mao dismissed and denounced Peng, threatening to leave the party if criticism continued, and replaced him with Lin Biao as Defense Minister who then purged Peng’s supporters from the military. In 1959, Mao stepped down as Chairman and was replaced by pragmatist moderates such as Liu Shaoqi (the new chairman) and Deng Xiaoping (the new General Secretary), who changed policy to bring economic recovery, including re-instating some level of privatization, importing more grain, and reducing the number of large communes, even attempting early population control by encouraging contraceptives. In 1962, Liu Shaoqi who in 1949 was second-in-command to Mao Zedong, became president of the PRC-- he was a leader of the pragmatist line of thought (he believed in gradual modernization and development of the country before socialist transformation, wanting stability and control). In 1962, there was a 7,000 Cadres Conference of the CCP Central Committee where Mao’s “Great Leap” policies were openly criticized and Mao even engaged in self-criticism. Although Mao Zedong had originally supported Liu Shaoqi as his successor, by 1963 he had changed his tune due to Liu Shaoqi’s opposition to his policies.
A few years after this began the Great Cultural Revolution. Mao succeeded in restoring his prestige from 1963 on by biding his time, relying on his fame as the embodiment of the revolution, and building up support in the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) and the Central Cultural Revolution Committee and key government posts. Mao developed a rivalry with his former second-in-command and partner Liu Shaoqi, who many viewed as adopting along with Deng Xiaoping western, revisionist ideas. In 1962, Mao began the Socialist Re-education Movement or Socialist Education Movement: he wanted to weed out “bourgeoisie tendencies” with ideological rectification, and wanted better local-level party cadres (reminding them that goals of revolution were to deal with class struggle, rather than economic development). Opposition from Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping caused Mao to begin more intense campaigns (the beginning of the Cultural Revolution).The Cultural Revolution was launched in August 1966: Mao shut down the nation’s schools, calling for a massive youth mobilization to take current party leaders to task for their lack of revolutionary spirit and bourgeous values. Students formed paramilitary groups called Red Guards to harass their elders and intellectuals, and a personality cult grew up around Mao. Three “Learn From” campaigns were launched, encouraging the Chinese to “learn from” successful people and places who followed the socialist model. One was “Learn from Daqing” (a barren province that had become a lucrative oil field, allowing China to become self-sufficient in oil)—a challenge to workers in other industrial sectors along the lines of “in industry, learn from Daqing.” The most famous was the “Learn from Lei Feng” campaign. Lei Feng was a soldier who died in 1962 and was used as propaganda and an example of a model soldier and socialist citizen for the party by Lin Biao; he thus raised devotion to the party and support for Mao Zedong Thought; Lei Feng was eulogized as a diligent, ordinary worker who was devoted to Chairman Mao. The Lei Feng character helped make people more committed to the Cultural Revolution and is still a cultural icon today. During the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao had the now-famous “Little Red Book” of Mao’s quotations printed and distributed throughout China.
By 1967, Liu Shaoqi was removed from office, placed under house arrest and struggled against for being a “capitalist roader”—he was beaten and died in prison in 1969. Deng Xiaoping was sent to Sichuan for self-criticism. Chinese cities were almost at anarchy by September 1967, when Mao had Lin Biao send in troops to restore order; many urban Red Guard members were sent to rural areas where the movement declined. The huge migration to the countryside resulted in the “Lost Generation”—those who missed out on education and then spent their early twenties in rural areas far from the culture and vibrancy of the cities. Industrial production and the economy meanwhile declined, dropping 12% between 1966-1968. 1.5 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1969, at the Ninth Party Congress, the Cultural Revolution was declared a success, ending its violent phase, and Lin Biao was officially designated Mao’s successor. However, he then used border clashes with USSR troops to institute martial law, and the power of the military (PLA or People’s Liberation Army) was growing. But Mao felt threatened by this power play and began to maneuver against him with Zhou Enlai (one of the founders of the CCP along with Mao who had been with Mao all through the Long March and remained an important party member); in September 1971 Lin Biao died in an airplane crash while trying to escape to the USSR, his high military command was purged, and Zhou took over greater control of the government. Lin Biao’s brutal death, and his denunciation as a radical by Mao, led many Chinese to feel disillusioned about Mao’s high-minded “revolution”, which had seemed to devolve into a power struggle between Mao and his former favorite, who had previously been adulated.
As a side-note, around this time (1971-1972) was the beginning of a diplomatic rapprochement with the United States, as Richard Nixon visited the People’s Republic of China.
Zhou Enlai stabilized China by reviving the education system and restoring numerous former officials purged by “struggle sessions” (forced self-criticisms) and the Cultural Revolution, but in 1972 Mao suffered a stroke and Zhou learned he had cancer. Mao resurrected Deng Xiaoping (originally purged at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution) as the successor of Zhou Enlai and himself, but then there grew up a rivalry between Deng Xiaping (allied with Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying) and the “Gang of Four”. The Gang of Four was a radical leftist faction within the CCP including Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s last wife, a glamorous younger woman), Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. They were also close to Mao and held power in the later stages of the Cultural Revolution. A power struggle then occurred with respect to who Mao would appoint his successor, between the alliance of Deng Xiaoping, Ye Jianying, and Zhou Enlai vs. the Gang of Four.
Zhou Enlai died in 1976, leading to the Tiananmen incident. An outpouring of grief at Zhou Enlai’s death in Tiananmen square with students and others, also perhaps mobilized by the Nanjing incident opposing the Cultural Revolution, was cracked down on and labeled as counterrevolutionary immediately by the Gang of Four, who then had premier Deng Xiaoping purged and accused him of planning the event.
Mao then actually announced a third party, Hua Guofeng, as his successor rather than the Gang of Four to be vice Chairman of the party. Shortly thereafter, Mao died in 1976. Hua Guofeng then, hearing from advisors that the Gang of Four was plotting against him, had them and their supporters arrested, and then had them officially blamed along with Lin Biao for the Cultural Revolution’s excesses. He continued as premier, generally attempting to promote himself as a continuation of Mao and loyal Maoist. Deng Xiaoping sent him letters assuring his support, but he wouldn’t agree to bring back Deng Xiaoping and his “revisionist” ideas.
In 1978, there was the 3rd Plenum of 11th Party Congress, 1978- a pivotal meeting marking the beginning of the “Reform and Opening Up” policy, widely seen as the moment when Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader of China replacing Chairman Hua Guofeng, who remained nominal Chairman of the Communist Party of China until 1980. Marked a repudiation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution policies, and set China on course for national economic reforms. Party members (the Politburo), decided to have Deng Xiaoping brought back and rehabilitated, and a new constitution was established after the 1975 short-lived “Cultural Revolution” constitution, patterned after the 1954 constitution with a ten-year plan emphasizing heavy industry, energy, and capital construction. Deng Xiaoping, now Committee Vice-Chairman, reversed convictions from the Anti-Rightist campaign, the government saying it needed capitalists’ experience to get the country moving economically, even though Deng Xiaoping had initially been an enthusiastic prosecutor of the movement in 1957. Deng Xiaoping and the government promoted a new era of Economic Reform and Opening Up through policies known as the “Four Modernizations”, promoted by Deng Xiaoping, along with legal reform, to achieve “socialism with Chinese characteristics. The Four Modernizations were modernizations of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense. Local leaders promoted these reforms, which Deng adopted, along with promoting economic planning, a kind of market socialism. Hua Guofeng’s ten-year plan was replaced with a five-year plan. The government also cracked down on crime at the same time.
In 1978, “Democracy Wall” also grew up where people put up “big character posters” on a wall in Beijing to call attention to the injustices of the past, “speaking bitterness” during a brief period of political liberation known as Beijing Spring. Most of the posters criticized the Gang of Four and Hua Guofeng, who by 1979 was largely forgotten and Deng Xiaoping was again firmly in charge. However, then Wei Jingsheng put up “The Fifth Modernization”, calling for democracy as the fifth modernization alongside the “Four Modernizations” promulgated by Deng Xiaoping. This was seen as going too far, and Wei Jingsheng was arrested and Democracy Wall’s brief outpouring of free speech was quelled.
In 1979, around this time, the Carter administration began to shift US diplomatic ties from Taiwan to mainland China. In 1981, Zhao Ziyang replaced Hua Guofeng as premier, and along with Deng Xiaoping continued the push for economic privatization. In 1980, the party held the “Gang of Four”, first arrested in 1976, on trial and after the trial, party leaders frequently blamed the Gang of Four for the Cultural Revolution (along with Lin Biao), described as examples of corruption in China
Right around this same time, in 1979, the government began to apply the “one child policy” (after the previous decade had seen a discouragement by the government in having lots of children), with some rural families being allowed to have two children if the first was a daughter, and others could pay a fine to have two children. This policy would last throughout the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s.
In the 1980s, religious freedom was restored, reforms continued, although there was a brief 1983 revival of the cultural revolution in the form of “Anti Spiritual pollution” campaign confiscating pornography, western hairstyles were cut, and army units were required to sing “Socialism is Good”, though this campaign was quickly halted by Deng Xiaoping.. Aspects of “Spiritual Pollution” included humanism, excessive individualism, obsession with money/materialism, superstition, and Western clothing, styles, and pornography. However, students in 1986 began to protest against the slow pace of reform, also citing excessive government control such as compulsory calisthenics and not being allowed to dance at rock concerts or study abroad. Hu Yaobang, a protégé of Deng and leading advocate of reform, was blamed for the protests and made to resign as CCP General Secretary. In 1987, many party elders and veterans of the Long March formally stepped down from power, allowing a new younger generation to arise. Li Peng, a known political hardliner, was appointed as premier, however, perhaps as a concession to Deng Xiaoping’s opponents. In 1988, the government formally endorsed market socialism and took down portraits of Marx, Engels and Stalin keeping only those of Mao and Sun Yat-Sen. However, Zhao Ziyang in 1988 as Party Secretary tried to accelerate price reform, leading to rampant inflation and a debate over whether to rapidly reform or increase economic controls and centralization.
Hu Yaobang’s death in 1989 led to the infamous Tiananmen Square massacre (also known as the June Fourth incident in China). Students camped out in the square to mourn Hu Yaobang’s death, and protest against slow reform, inflation, lack of freedoms such as free speech and political participation, and corruption. The students’ protests also struck a chord with some in China, such as rural workers, who felt that the economic reforms had not benefited them. Some in the government, most notably Zhao Ziyang, who had been an important activist for more freedoms and reform especially as premier from 1980-1987, sympathized with the students. Zhao Ziyang acted in a conciliatory manner, and some students returned to class. At the same time, some students began hunger strikes two days before the visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Eventually, a million citizens including even police and lower party officials joined the students’ movement. The authorities felt threatened and feared another revolution. Party hardliners, led by Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng, eventually decided it was necessary to crackdown and declare martial law. Zhao Ziyang went to the square to plead with the students to evacuate, saying he was “too late”. The government then sent in tanks to clear out the square, declaring martial law. Many (hundreds to thousands) were massacred, although typically it was union workers and other citizens of Beijing blocking the tanks in the street rather than the actual students. Afterward, Zhao Ziyang was purged politically. Western nations criticized the incident and imposed economic sanctions and arms embargoes.
Deng Xiaoping then retired formally and was replaced by Jiang Zemin, former mayor of Shanghai. Jiang consolidated power in the party, state and military and during the 1990s China’s economy grew rapidly. Inflation subsided. Since then, China’s economy has grown dramatically and the CCP leadership has remained largely on the path of market allocation and opening up to foreign investment within a socialist framework and single-party political system keeping tight control over the country and economy. Deng Xiaoping eventually died in 1997. In 1997, Hong Kong was peacefully returned to China from Great Britain as per the terms of a 100-year-old treaty, and China chose to keep it as a special economically independent area, with independence in all areas except foreign affairs and defense for another fifty years.
Meanwhile, across the water in Taiwan, changes were afoot. In 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party was established. In 2000, this party under leader Chen Sui Pien was elected, ending the long (and often authoritarian) rule of the GMD. Chiang Kai-Shek had previously started to support the change to democracy and end of martial law.
As the economy continued chugging along in the 2000s, the government cracked down on Falun Gong, a popular religious/meditative/yoga practice, fearing that a movement like this could be used by anti-government activists. New Premier Zhu Rongji kept things on track with China’s GDP generally growing by around 8%. The government has also struggled to modernize/privatize state owned enterprises without causing unemployment, and helping the lost generation from the Cultural Revolution without proper education to have work in a privatized market workforce. China engaged in export-led growth, exporting lots of manufacturing goods. China tried to develop poorer inland provinces to prevent migration and regional resentment. Instituting localized registration systems which determine where you can access government services based on where you were born helped reduce migration, and success in the nationwide education exam became a major determinant of your future.
In 2008, over 300 Chinese dissident intellectuals and human rights activists published the Chapter 08 Manifesto, asking for democratic reforms, freedom and rights akin to those in western democratic governments. Liu Xiaobo was a literary critic and human rights activist who was one of the authors; he had also initiated hunger strikes during Tiananmen and then continued to fight for reform. He was put in prison and was then awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2010. In 2008, China hosted the summer Olympics, and showed off its impressive economic growth and governmental control. In 2009, the government relaxed the one-child policy so that if both parents were only children, they could have two children. In 2013, the Chinese government allowed families to have two children if one parent was an only child.
