AP Comp Gov - China History

CHINA

Zhogguo: Middle Kingdom

Population:

• 90% HAN (ethnic group), but many different types of ethnic group

Mandarin vs. Cantonese:

• Mandarin is the official language in Mainland China and Taiwan
• Cantonese is mainly spoken in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces.
• Written characters are essentially the same, but the pronuncian is completely different.

Historical Influences Before 1949:

• Dynastic rule
• The mandate of heaven
• A strong merit-based bureaucracy
• Confucianism
• The dynastic cycle
• 1. The New Dynasty: restores peace, redistributes land to the peasants, appoints loyal officers, repairs defensive walls, build roads, canals, and irrigation projects.
• 2. After several generations, the new dynasty becomes and aging dynasty
• 3. Aging dynasty: corrupt officials, losing control of provinces, imposing heavy tax burden, allowing defensive walls to decay.
• 4. Aging dynasty loses the Mandate of Heaven
• 5: Problems symbolic of lost Mandate: peasant rebellions, floods, famine, earthquakes, armed bandits in provinces, invasions.
• 6. New dynasty claims the Mandate of Heaven.
• Impact of dynastic rule
• Political culture inherited from centuries of dynastic rule centers around:
• Confucian values
• Order, harmony, strong sense of hierarchy – “superior” and “subservient” positions.
• Scholarship as a way to establish superiority
• Strong sense of cultural identity and a relatively high degree of cultural homogeneity
• Ethnocentrism
• Control by imperialistic nations
• “spheres of influence”
• resentment of the “foreign devils” that they eventually rebelled against
• resistance to imperialism impact:
• nationalism
• nationalism secured by the revolution of 1911 and the hatred of the “foreign devils” has led China to be cautious and suspicious in her dealings with capitalist countries today.
• Revolutionary upheavals
• 1911 revolution
• period of warlordism (1916-1927)
• Nationalist China under Chiang Khai-shek
• Kuomintage Party ruled until the invasion of the Japanese
• Three themes dominated this revolutionary era
• Nationalism
• Establishing a new political community
• Socioeconomic development

The Long March

• 1934-36 pursuit of Mao’s army across China by Chiang and his supporters
• Mao emerged as a hero of the people, and many of his loyal friends on the march lived on to be prominent leaders of the People’s Republic of China after its founding in 1949.

GMD-CCP Civil War 1946-1949

• GMD: Guomindang (Nationalist Party): Chiang Kai-shek (President)
• CCP: Chinese Communist Party: Mao Zedong

1949—the PRC

• After WWII ended the Japanese leave China
• The forces of Chiang and Mao met in the Civil War and Mao prevailed
• In 1949 Chiang fled to Taiwan, and Mao established the People’s Republic of China under Communist rule.

Taiwan’s Current Situation

• Beijing still views the island as part of its territory
• Taiwan Relations Act: passed in 1979 switched US regonition from ROC to the PRC—President Jimmy Carter
• Weapons must be of a defensive nature
• No embassy—an “institute”
• Today Washington is the leading arms supplier to self-ruled Taiwan
• During his visit to China in November, Obama reiterated that the US believed there was only one China.

The political development of the PRC

• Phases:
• The Soviet Model (1949-1957)
• Land Reform – eliminate landlord class
• Civil Reform
• First National People’s Congress (1954)
• Five-Year Plans
• Nationalize – state owned enterprises
• Collectivize
• Socialism

Hundred Flowers Campaign

• Began to break from the Soviet Model
• 1956: encouraged public dissent and criticism
• Prominent critics (mostly intellectuals and party elites) then removed from power
• replaced with party loyalists, yet unqualified for the positions

The Great Leap Forward (1958-1960)

• A utopian effort to transform China into a radical egalitarian society
• Its emphasis was mainly economic, and it was based on four principles:
• All-around development
• Industry and agriculture
• Mass mobilization
• Backyard furnaces, communes
• Political unanimity and zeal
• Decentralization

Failure of the Great Leap Forward:

• Estimated that between 20-40 million people died between 1959-1962
• Largest famine in world history
• Unrealistic output targets
• Industry
• Agricultural and human disaster

Cultural Revolution (1966-76)

• Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
• Purge of party cadres
• Purge of intellectuals
• Political, social, and economic change
• Mao’s main goal was to purify the party and the country through radical transformation and revolutionary fervor
• Remove all vestiges of the old China and its hierarchical bureaucracy and emphasis on inequality
• Red Guards attacked “intellectuals” to remove “bourgeoisie influences”
• Sent to manual labor camps, forced to make public criticisms, many executed

The Little Red Book

• Mao’s Cult of Personality
• “Learn from the masses, and then teach them.”

Maoism

• Mao Zedong was strongly influenced by Karl Marx and Lenin, but his version of communism was distinctly suited for China.
• He believed in the strength of the peasant, and centered his philosophy around these central values:
• Collectivism
• Struggle and activism
• Mass line
• Egalitarianism
• Self-reliance

Diplomatic Achievements

• 1971, PRC became the representative of China in UN (replaced ROC)
• 1972, President Nixon visited Beijing

Mao and Zhou Died in 1976

• Turning point in China’s postwar era
• “Gang of Four” were arrested
• End of the Cultural Revolution

Deng Xioping’s Modernizations (1978-1997)

• Mao died in 1976, leaving his followers divided into factions
• Radicals
• The Military
• The Moderates
• The Gang of Four and Madame Mao (Jiang Qing)
• 1978, the new leader emerged – Deng Xiaoping
• New policies
• “Open door” trade policy
• reform in education cultivated foreign relations

Deng Xiaoping Theory

• The result of his leadership was a dramatic turnaround of the Chinese economy through a combination of socialist planning and the capitalist free market
• He encouraged the creation of a market economy and capitalist-like enterprises, and by the early 1990s his reforms had helped lift an estimated 170 million peasants out of extreme poverty
• He refused to lessen the power of the Communist Party over the lives of ordinary Chinese citizens.

Deng Xiaoping Reforms

• Abolished Mao’s rural agricultural communes and allowed peasants to cultuvate family plots
• Grain harvests quickly increased
• City dwellers were allowed to start small-scale businesses
• Ordinary Chinese were allowed to buy consumer goods
• Actively courted international investors
• Imposed tough population controls that included forced abortions to limit families to one or two children
• Remade education in China
• Charged the Cultural Revolution had produced “an entire generation of mental cripples” by shutting gown schools and sucking the student population into the Red Guards
• Deng allowed students to go abroad for college sparking a craze for learning English
• Negotiated an agreement with the British government to return Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1997

Free Market = Free Expression?

• Throughout Deng’s economic reforms, however, he kept an iron fist ready to crush any threats to the nation’s Communist dictatorship
• In Deng’s final five years, virtually all of China’s dissidents were imprisoned or exiled abroad
• Also supported the use of tanks and guns to end the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, where hundreds of students and bystanders were believed to have been killed

“Socialist Market Economy”

• Break the monopoly of state ownership
• 3 million private enterprises employ 43 million people
• 24 million individual businesses employ 48 million people
• foreign-invested enterprises employ 9 million
• reforms of the state-owned enterprises
• transformation into joint-stock companies

Tian’anmen 1989

• CCP General Secretary Shao Ziyang (elite reformist) was removed from all positions
• Deng Xiaoping retired from day-to-day policy

Political Authoritarianism

§ Jiang Zemin

o Falun Gong

o Reunification with Taiwan

o Continued economic growth

§ Hu Jintao – 2002

o 2003 SARS crisis

o Tibet protests

o Olympics 2008