IGCSE History

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• China under Mao Zedong 1949 - 1959 (B10)
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  • The First Five Year Pan
  • The 100 Flowers
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The 100 flowers

Despite the industrial success of the First Five Year Plan, it created huge problems. The increase in the numbers of city dwellers meant that food and housing were in very short supply. This led to a great deal of criticism of the Plan. Apparently in response to this criticism, Mao allowed public discussion of the plan. In May 1956 Lu Dungyi, the propaganda chief of the CCP issued the slogan 'Let a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand schools of thought contend’. In February 1957 Mao backed up this statement by calling for public discussion to resolve the problems faced by the Party. This became known as the Hundred Flowers.

The Hundred Flowers was most untypical of Mao, who normally resented criticism and who disliked experts and intellectuals. On the face of it, therefore, Mao was calling for a great debate on the Five Year Plan, but in reality the campaign may well not have been sincere, but simply an attempt to discover any potential opponents.

One interpretation of the Hundred Flowers is that Mao had travelled widely throughout China during the early 1950s and had always been received very warmly. He may have believed that it was now possible to allow greater freedom of expression in China. Mao also seems to have heard that local CCP officials had been accused of acting heavy-handedly and wanted to hear other opinions. Mao may also have become concerned that China was beginning to suffer from the bureaucracy that had affected Soviet Russia. Here there were layers of officials who all had some say in decision-making. Mao seems to have wanted to cut through the red tape and produce a simpler more direct party organisation.

But there is also evidence that Mao’s ideas were becoming less popular in China. In 1954 President Liu Shaoqi had delivered a report to the Congress of the CCP in which he mentioned Mao's name 104 times. At the next Congress in 1956 Liu mentioned Mao only four times. The constitution of 1945 stated that the CCP should be guided by the ‘Thought of Mao Zedong'. In the constitution of 1956 the phrase was not included. To Mao, changes such as this may suggested a weakening of his position in China. Therefore, an alternative view of the Hundred Flowers is that Mao was simply encouraging his opponents to speak out so that he could identify them and deal with them.

Whatever Mao’s motives were, the results of the Hundred Flowers were startling. Many people openly criticised the Plan, especially university lecturers, artists, writers and teachers. Party individuals and policies were attacked as being corrupt, inefficient or unrealistic. Even Mao himself was included. Faced by this criticism, Mao called an immediate end to the campaign and began the Anti-rightist movement, which was directed by Deng Xiaoping. Most of the critics were arrested, lost their jobs and underwent periods of re-education in labour camps. This usually involved making public apologies for their actions. Some leading figures in the CCP were purged. Altogether about 500,000 people were removed.

By the late 1950s the problems caused by China’s rapidly rising population were becoming severe. The population of China's cities had grown, but food supplies had not matched the increase. Mao’s solution was to bring peasants under central control. He ordered the creation of 25,000 Communes. Most contained about 5-6,000 people, but some were as large as several hundred thousand.

The aim of Collectivisation was to restore the balance between the cities and the countryside. The Second Five Year Plan, which began alongside Collectivisation in 1957, was also based on the Commune. Many peasants, who had migrated to the cities during the First Five Year Plan to find work, were now ordered to leave the cities and return to the Communes.

Life in the Communes was strictly regimented. Peasants were ordered to live communally in dormitories, eat in mess halls and tear down their own houses. One aim of this treatment was to try to ensure that the family would become less important. Schools would take over responsibility for the rearing of children. This would ensure that children grew up suitably indoctrinated with Maoist ideas. However, these ideas were only put into practice on a few occasions.

It was not only peasants’ lives that were strictly controlled in the Communes. Strict controls were also enforced to regulate agricultural methods. All individual plots of land were confiscated by the Commune and peasants were also ordered to farm according to instructions and not according to their own experience. This meant that peasants’ knowledge of local conditions was ignored and replaced by central planning. To make matters even worse, the ideas of the Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko were adopted. He had put forward fraudulent theories, which did great harm to farming. For example, he ordered deep ploughing, which ruined the topsoil and bird-scaring, which allowed insects and pests to flourish.

The results of Collectivisation were disastrous. In 1958 China produced 200 million tonnes of grain and 4.3 million tonnes of meat, but by 1960 the figures were 143.5
million tonnes of wheat and 1.3 million tonnes of meat. Much of the blame lay with the central government, which had assumed that the 1958 figure was 260,000,000. The amount of land set aside for arable farming had, therefore, been reduced. In some areas the problems were made even worse by drought, which reduced crop yields even more.

The falls in production led to a major famine and about 30,000,000 Chinese died. But CCP officials dared not report this to Mao. Peng Dehuai, the Defence Minister attempted to reveal the truth in 1959, but he was condemned and dismissed. In response to Peng’s attacks, Mao had threatened to resign from all his posts if Peng was not dismissed. Eventually, however, even Mao had to admit that Collectivisation was a failure, but he reacted by accusing officials of incompetence.

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