Mao's China

On the first day of October 1949, the Chinese Communist Party, led by its leader Mao Zedong, established the People's Republic of China. It was an epochal event: after the Soviet Union, another large country assumed a communist leadership and completely changed the structures first of all of Asia and then of the entire world.

As had already happened in Russia, the affirmation of the revolution came at the end of a civil war that pitted the nationalist party of the Guomindang, led since 1925 by the conservative general Chiang Kai-Shek, against the Chinese Communist Party founded in 1921 by Mao Zedong. The conflict began at the end of the 1920s and was suspended only to counter the Japanese invasion of China started in 1937. During the civil war the communist forces managed to overcome desperate situations, such as the Long March of 10,000 kilometers across China to escape the nationalist offensive (1934-1935). In those years, however, Mao's communists were also able to gain the support of the peasants, who made a fundamental contribution to the victory of Mao's army in 1949. Chiang Kai-Shek fled into exile in Taiwan, where he formed a government that considered itself the only legitimate executive of the Republic of China.

The main protagonist of the revolutionary and war epic that led to the birth of the People's Republic of China was naturally Mao Zedong, to whom Guido Samarani , professor of Chinese History at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, dedicated a well-documented biography: “Mao Zedong” (Salerno Editrice, 2024, pp. 298).

One fact emerges clearly from the book: we cannot understand the People's Republic of China today, although so far from that of 1949, if we do not start from its roots. And those roots were planted by Mao, who for almost thirty years, until his death in 1976, looked after and directed the development of the Chinese nation. President, Great Helmsman, father of Chinese communism and revolutionary and socialist China, ruthless and tyrannical leader: like every great protagonist in history, Mao Zedong was also the victim of different and antithetical judgments. Samarani reconstructs his political and personal path, using the large amount of available documents, in Chinese and in the main Western languages, and benefiting from the most significant results of the historiographical debate in China and the West.

He tells us how Mao shaped China and the Chinese. In 1949 Mao found himself in a complex situation, because he had to create a communist state structure in the context of an immense country, with very large potential resources but with a present of destruction and misery, after almost fifty years of wars, revolutions, instability. The communist government immediately imposed radical economic reforms: nationalization of large industrial and commercial enterprises, collectivization of land and support for heavy industry. The results were significant in terms of heavy industry production (+20%), but poor for agricultural production and this was a big problem because China at the time was a peasant country. For this reason Mao announced the "great leap forward" in 1958, a program that was supposed to favor the growth of both the agricultural and industrial sectors. The backbone of this initiative were the popular communes, communities that brought together dozens of farming families: each commune had to aim for self-sufficiency and share every aspect of working and daily life (from meals to children's education). The results, however, were disastrous: agricultural production collapsed and between 1959 and 1960 China was hit by a terrible famine, in which it is estimated that over twenty million people died. In this difficult moment the Chinese leader could not count on the support of the other great communist country, the USSR.

Initially, the Soviet Union had supported the new communist China by signing an alliance pact and providing both economic and technological aid. But relations began to deteriorate significantly after Stalin's death in 1953, when his successor Khrushchev began a process of economic and diplomatic openness and détente with the West that Mao bluntly defined as a betrayal of communist doctrine. Beyond ideological and economic policy differences, the stakes were high: China aspired to occupy the role of leading nation in the Asian world, where communist regimes were expanding, and intended to place itself at the head of a new system of alliances between the many countries that were achieving independence. As a result, relations with the USSR became increasingly tense until they reached a real rupture, accentuated by the Chinese announcement in 1964 that it had created its own atomic bomb. The conflicts with the USSR and the resounding failure of the “great leap forward” had made the situation very unstable even on the internal front, so much so that at the beginning of the 1960s tensions and divisions increased within the Communist Party. In 1966 Mao reacted by launching the cultural revolution that was supposed to attack every form of privilege and lead to social regeneration, even against the party itself. The instrument of this new revolutionary wave were the young people, especially students, who attacked the hierarchical structures of society and the intellectuals who were hit in many and humiliating ways. The Red Guards – as these communist youth organizations called themselves – kept the revolutionary impulse alive, often resorting to violence, but also putting the productive structures in crisis. The party cadres and the army itself were involved in the political struggle; Mao, between 1968 and 1969, had to take more moderate positions to lead what was nevertheless a revolutionary acceleration. A new pragmatism then emerged and China moved closer to the United States in the 1970s, obtaining economic aid and the seat in the United Nations that had until then been held by Nationalist China from Taiwan. It was at this time that China was put on the launch pad to become the superpower it is today.

The Great Helmsman was now at the end of his existence, but he had already set the course for the decades to come.