IGCSE History

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• Introduction to IGCSE
• The Road to Affluence: USA 1917 - 1941 (A9)
  • 1917 - 1929
    • The impact of the First World War
    • Immigration
    • Henry Ford and mass production
    • Farming in the 1920s
    • The Stock Market Boom
  • 1929 - 1941
    • The Wall Street Crash
    • The Depression
    • The policies of Hoover
    • Roosevelt and the New Deal
    • Reactions to the New Deal
• International Relations 1919-1939 (A8)
  • Collective Security
    • The Versailles Settlement
    • The Foundation of the League of Nations
    • Strengths and weaknesses of the League of Nations
    • Successes and failures of the League of Nations
    • Locarno and the Kellogg-Briand Pact
  • Appeasement
    • Manchuria
    • The Disarmament Conference
    • Abyssinia
    • Hitler and the League
    • Appeasement in action
• Revolution in China 1949 - 1996 (A14)
  • 1949 - 1976
    • China under Mao
    • Reform under Liu and Deng
    • The reasons for the Cultural Revolution
    • The impact of the Cultural Revolution
    • China 1971 - 1976
  • 1976 - 1996
    • The defeat of the Gang of Four
    • China under Deng Xiaoping
    • Reforms of the economy
    • The Democracy Movement
    • China in the 1990s
• South-East Asia 1945 - 1900 (A15)
  • Indo-China
    • The end of the French Empire
    • Vietnam 1954 - 1965
    • US involvement in Vietnam
    • The unification of Vietnam
    • Laos and Cambodia
  • South-East Asia
    • The struggle for control of Malaya
    • The creation of Malaysia
    • Singapore
    • Suharto and Indonesia
    • Sukarno and Pancasila
• Conflict and Crisis is the Middle East 1946 - 1996 (A16)
  • Unit overview
  • 1946 - 1967
    • The creation of Israel
    • The impact of the war of 1948 - 1949
    • The Suez Crisis
    • Superpower involvement in the Middle East
    • The Six Day War
  • 1967 - 1996
    • International terrorism
    • The war of Yom Kippur
    • The Palestinian Liberation Organisation
    • Lebanon and the occupied territories
    • Successes and failures from Camp David to Oslo
• The First World War (B4)
  • The Schlieffen Plan
  • Deadlock on the Western Front
  • Gallipoli
  • The Somme and Passchendaele
  • The War at Sea
  • The defeat of Germany
• The USA 1917-1929 (B7)
  • The Roaring Twenties
  • Advertising and consumerism
  • New forms of entertainment
  • Prohibition
  • Gangsterism
  • Hollywood
• China under Mao Zedong 1949 - 1959 (B10)
  • The creation of the Communist State
  • Land Reform
  • Communist society
  • The First Five Year Pan
  • The 100 Flowers
  • The Great Leap Forward
• The Changing Nature of Warfare (C3)
  • Unit overview
  • Warfare at the beginning of the 20th Century
  • Land warfare
  • Sea and aerial warfare
  • Atomic and nuclear weapons
  • Warfare at the end of the 20th Century
• Links

China under Mao

In 1949 Mao Zedong’s position in China was unchallenged. He was able to claim all of the credit for the defeat of the Japanese and the GMD. He became the President of the People’s Republic of China and from October 1949 governed China as a virtual dictator. His immediate aims were to establish communist rule throughout the country and to bring about land reform. He knew that many areas of China, especially the big cities, still supported the GMD. They had to be brought into line. The peasants, who had loyally supported the CCP had to be rewarded and landlordism had to be destroyed. China then had to be modernised so that it could compete with foreign countries.

Although Mao was a revolutionary, in many ways he was still very traditionally Chinese. He began by accepting aid from the Soviet Union in the First Five Year Plan, and even copied the idea from Stalin, but he gradually gave up relying on any foreign aid and used Chinese methods. The big difference of opinion was over the foundations of the CCP. The Soviet idea was that communism was based on industrial workers. It was they who had started the Russian Revolution and been the main supporters of the Bolsheviks. But Mao preferred to rely on the peasants, who had main the main supporters of the CCP.

In basing the CCP on peasants rather than industrial workers, Mao was following Chinese tradition. Confucian ideas emphasised that a person’s relationship to the land was very important in society. Mao also rejected modern methods of industrialisation. When he launched the Second Five Year Plan, he preferred to use manual labour rather than new technology. This was partly because China did not have much new machinery, but also because Mao was trying to emphasis the importance of hard, manual labour as a way of bringing about progress. The Great Leap Forward was based almost entirely upon a domestic system in which steel was produced by people in their own backyards. Mao relied on methods like this because he distrusted experts. In this respect, despite everything else, Mao was behaving just like a Chinese peasant.

Mao’s refusal to use modern methods resulted in many of his changes being ineffective. He usually would not accept advice and anyone who criticised him was usually dealt with. By the end of the 1950s it was obvious that China was not making the sort of progress that was expected. It was impossible to get rid of Mao completely, but from 1959 he began to lose some of his influence.

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