The Mao era

The Founding of the PRC

On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China from the Tiananmen rostrum, declaring that the Chinese people 'have stood up' (中国人民站起来了). The provisional constitutional framework was the Common Programme of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), adopted 29 September 1949, which served as an interim constitution until the first PRC Constitution of 20 September 1954. The 1954 Constitution established the National People's Congress (NPC) as the supreme organ of state power and codified the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Consolidation, 1949-1953

The new state moved rapidly to consolidate control. The Agrarian Reform Law of 28 June 1950 abolished landlord landownership and redistributed land to roughly 300 million peasants, accompanied by violent struggle sessions in which an estimated one to two million landlords were killed. The Marriage Law of 1 May 1950 banned arranged marriage, concubinage, and child betrothal, granting women the right to divorce. Politically, the regime launched the Three-anti (1951) campaign against corruption, waste, and bureaucracy within the party-state, and the Five-anti (1952) campaign against the urban bourgeoisie.

Externally, the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance signed with the USSR on 14 February 1950 anchored China in the Soviet bloc and yielded a $300 million loan. China's intervention in the Korean War (October 1950, the 'War to Resist America and Aid Korea') under the Chinese People's Volunteer Army cost some 180,000-400,000 Chinese lives but cemented the regime's nationalist legitimacy.

The Socialist Transformation and the First Five-Year Plan

The First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957), modelled on Soviet central planning and assisted by Soviet advisers and the '156 projects', prioritised heavy industry. Output of steel and coal rose sharply, and Soviet-designed plants such as the Anshan Iron and Steel Works expanded. Concurrently, the socialist transformation collectivised agriculture into Agricultural Producers' Cooperatives and nationalised private industry and commerce into joint state-private enterprises; by 1956 the transition to public ownership was substantially complete.

The brief liberalisation of the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956-57), inviting intellectuals to 'let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend', produced sharp criticism of the party. Mao reversed course with the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, in which roughly 550,000 intellectuals were branded 'rightists' and purged. This pattern—invitation to speak followed by punishment—established the volatility of intellectual life that would define the Mao era and is a recurring theme in Guokao 申论 (Shenlun) essays on the relationship between governance and expertise.

The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1962

In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, abandoning Soviet-style gradualism for utopian mass mobilisation. Rural society was reorganised into People's Communes, the first established at Chayashan, Henan, in April 1958; by year's end some 26,000 communes encompassed 99 percent of the peasant population, abolishing private plots and household cooking in favour of communal mess halls. The campaign set fantastical targets—'surpass Britain in fifteen years'—and promoted backyard steel furnaces that yielded unusable pig iron while diverting labour from the harvest.

Inflated grain reports, the cadre culture of exaggeration (浮夸风), and continued state procurement produced the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), the deadliest famine in recorded history, with demographic estimates of 15-45 million excess deaths. At the Lushan Conference (July-August 1959) Defence Minister Peng Dehuai criticised the Leap in a private letter; Mao denounced him as the leader of an 'anti-party clique', removed him, and intensified the campaign. Pragmatic recovery followed under Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping after 1961, including the partial return of private plots.

The Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976

Reasserting authority, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. The May 16 Notification (1966) and the Sixteen Points (8 August 1966) of the CPC Central Committee provided its programme. Mobilised Red Guards attacked the 'Four Olds' (old ideas, culture, customs, habits), persecuted teachers and 'capitalist roaders', and elevated the Little Red Book of Mao quotations. President Liu Shaoqi, branded 'China's Khrushchev', was purged and died in detention in 1969.

The Ninth Party Congress (1969) named Lin Biao as Mao's successor; Lin died on 13 September 1971 in a plane crash over Mongolia after an alleged coup plot. Power then concentrated around the radical Gang of Four (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen). The decade closed in 1976 with the deaths of Zhou Enlai (January), the Tangshan earthquake (28 July), and Mao Zedong (9 September); the Gang of Four was arrested on 6 October 1976, ending the era.

Why This Matters for the Exam

For the Guokao, the Mao era is examined in the 行测 (Xingce) common-knowledge section as discrete factual recall—dates, the sequence of campaigns, key documents like the 1954 Constitution—and in 申论 (Shenlun) as a source of analytical framing. The party's authoritative verdict is the 'Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the PRC' (27 June 1981), which judged Mao's contributions as primary and his errors, especially the Cultural Revolution, as secondary, attaching the '70 percent right, 30 percent wrong' assessment. Candidates must reproduce this official line precisely: PYQs reward command of the 1981 Resolution's terminology and the distinction it draws between Mao Zedong Thought and Mao's individual mistakes.