Mao Ze Dong to Deng Xiaoping

1. Mao Ze Dong to Deng Xiaoping • China in the 20th Century

2. Background • Mao Zedong (also called Mao Tse-tung) founded the Peoples Republic of China • Mao grew up a peasant and he believed strongly in communist ideas.

3. Chiang Kai-Shek • After President Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek took over the government and the Kuomintang. • Kai-shek started persecuting communists, and the civil war began. • After World War 2, Mao and the communists were stronger. They soon defeated the Kuomintang. Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island of Taiwan.

4. Foundation of Communist China • In 1949 Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China. • Mao was the Chairman of the Communist Party and the absolute leader of China. He was a brutal leader, who sometimes executed those who disagreed with him. • When he came to power, he instituted a five year plan modeled after and funded by the Soviet Union

5. Great Leap Forward • In 1958 Mao announced his plan to industrialize China. • He called it the Great Leap Forward. • The plan was to modernize Industry and Agriculture.

6. Great Leap Forward • In order to achieve the goal of modernization, Mao organized the people into communes. • The size of a commune was roughly 5000 families. People in a commune gave up their ownership of tools, animals etc so that everything was owned by the commune. • This all happened very rapidly, aided by propaganda and government involvement.

7. Propaganda Brave the wind and the waves, everything has remarkable abilities!!

8. Things go wrong • Political decisions/beliefs took precedence over commonsense and communes faced the task of doing things which they were incapable of achieving. • Party officials would order the impossible and commune leaders, who knew what their commune was capable of doing or not, could be charged with being a "bourgeois reactionary" if he complained. Such a charge would lead to prison.

9. Ultimately the plan didn’t work. The materials that the communes made were of low quality and the speed that the government demanded was basically impossible • Soon the country experienced a terrible famine. It is estimated that 20 million people starved to death.

10. "The chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility. Comrades, you must all analyse your own responsibility. If you have to fart, fart. You will feel much better for it." Mao accepts responsibility • Mao semi-retired from office, while maintaining massive public popularity • The day-to-day running of China was left to three moderates: Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. In late 1960, they abandoned the Great Leap Forward.

11. Cultural Revolution • From 1965-76 Mao made his comeback in the Cultural Revolution. • Mao believed that the progress China had made since 1949 had lead to a privileged class developing – engineers, scientists, factory managers etc. • Mao also believed that these people were acquiring too much power at his expense.

12. Mao targets his opponents • Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev for example, who are still nestling beside us.

13. Cultural Revolution These posters invited the Chinese youth of 1960’s and early 1970’s to actively influence and interfere with the flow of Chinese politics; the government actively encouraged extreme youth activism.

14. Cultural Revolution • Many young peasants followed him and formed the Red Guard. These loyal soldiers helped him to get rid of his rivals. • Schools were shut down because they were viewed as ‘too academic.’ • A popular punishment or ‘cure’ for those viewed as privileged was being sent down to the farm for a few months of hard labor.

15. Criticize the old world and build a new world with Mao Zedong Thought as a weapon

16. Permanent Revolution • The Red Guard used Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ as a source of inspiration. It is a collection of quotations from Mao outlining his ideology

17. Outcome • When Mao died in 1975, his wife and 3 others took over. They continued the Cultural Revolution. • The people started calling them the ‘Gang of Four’ and eventually they were arrested and blamed for most of the negative aspects of the Cultural Revolution. • To this day, the legacy of this policy is mixed. The government officially says that it was a bad idea, but most documentary evidence is classified.

18. Deng Xiaoping “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice” • Deng is sort of like the Chinese equivalent to Khrushchev or Gorbachev. He ended the cultural revolution, and allowed more open discussion (much like Glasnost). • He had been with Mao since the very beginning, and even though they disagreed on many issues, Mao could not bring himself to get rid of Deng.

19. The ‘opening of China’ • During Deng's years in power, relations with the West improved markedly. • Deng traveled abroad and had a series of amicable meetings with western leaders, traveling to the United States in 1979 to meet President Carter at the White House.

20. Economic ‘Miracle’ "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics"

21. Deng’s Plan • "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" • The goals of Deng's reforms were summed up by the Four Modernizations, those of agriculture, industry, science and technology and the military. • The strategy for achieving these aims, of becoming a modern, industrial nation, was the Socialist Market Economy

22. Deng’s Reforms • Many of the reforms that Deng created originated at the local level. A local governor would introduce a reform that made sense for their region, and Deng would loosen the restrictions.

23. Gorbachev VS Deng • This contrasted with the pattern in Perestroika undertaken by Gorbachev in which most of the major reforms where originated by Gorbachev himself. • Many economists have argued that the bottom-up approach of the Dengs reforms, in contrast to the top-down approach of Perestroika, was a key factor in the former's success.

24. GRAPHS!!