HW 5

Identify at least one economic, social, political and foreign policy effect of Chinese Civil War. Refer to China Chapters 12 and 13 and The Lowe Text pages 415-419

Social:

Women's rights were prominent on the Communist agenda in the early years of its rule. In April 1950, the Marriage Law was introduced. This put a stop to arranged marriages, the marriage of children, murder of unwanted girl babies, and bigamy. Women were given more power, such as joint control over property with their husbands (rather than their husbands just having complete control), and divorce laws were updated (mutual consent in divorce was introduced). Another law in February of 1951 also introduced maternity leave and benefit, giving women two months wages after the birth of a child. There were 270 million women in China at the time, and before the Communist rule had virtually no rights and were subject to traditions such as footbinding that were ultimately harmful. This was the first step towards social equality between men and women.

Economic:

At the time of the Communist victory, China was very far behind most other countries economically. In addition, there was not enough food and a rapidly growing population; all things that led to economic strife. To combat this, the communists made major banks, the railway network, and a third of heavy industry into state property, the profits of which went straight to the State Treasury; this accounted for 2/3 of its yearly income. A People's Bank was opened in 1951 to replace private banks, and it had control of the issuing of money and over all transactions. This led to inflation being eradicated by the mid 1950s. Evidence of a single-party state's emergence was the treatment of food shortages: farmers had to sell 15 - 20% of their grain to the government at a fixed, low rate, and had to pay an agricultural tax.

Political:

Free speech was a casualty of Mao's single-party state. Due to the strain of the Five Year Plan, Mao's government became quite unpopular with the people. To combat this, Mao declared in his "Hundred Flowers" speech that his government was for the people and therefore it would be taking the complaints of the people and improving where they saw dissent. However, this ended in June 1957 when Mao swiftly took action against his critics. Some were fired from their jobs, others were sent to the country for "thought reform"; press was censored and free speech was banned. This is a sign of a dictatorship emerging.

Foreign Policy:

The PRC and the USSR entered a political relationship in 1949 after Mao came to power. Mao asked Stalin for financial help and, traveling to Moscow to talk to Staling, came to the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. This gave China both financial aid and "technical advice". Ultimately it was much more helpful to industry because it provided 10,000 engineers and planning experts who "planned China's economy"; the amount of money given was only $300 million over the course of 5 years, mostly in credits rather than cash. This relationship developed further under the influence of the Russian advisors with plans such as the First Five-Year Plan (1953-57).

HW 7

1. Identify and explain four of Mao's main aims as ruler of China (from notes also).

- Increase industrial output.

- Gain support from the USSR

- Rebuild China and build support from peasants and communes

- Get and maintain power

2. Identify and explain four major methods he used to try to achieve those aims. (think specific domestic policies)

- The Great Leap Forward: Mao's plan to make China into one of the world's leading industrial nations while improving agriculture. He hoped to overtake the English economy within 15 years and America's in 20 to 30 years. From 1958-1963.

-Communes: Mao reorganized the people into communes, which on average contained 5000 families who would give up land, animals and equipment to common ownership with everyone in the commune. Mao thought this would release the "tremendous energy of the masses" by increasing efficiency with things like communal eating halls (less time spent cooking by various people), and "houses of happiness" for the sick and infirm so that they wouldn't be a burden on their families.

-Propaganda: Posters, slogans and newspaper articles were used to make the chinese people enthusiastic about working long hours no matter the weather or bad conditions. Loudspeakers would play "revolutionary songs and stirring speeches" that encouraged the people to meet and exceed the goals for each target in the 5 Year Plan that was being implemented at the time. This essentially motivated people into achieving hefty tasks such as building a giant dam near Beijing.

- Backyard Steel Campaign: Emphasis on creating steel was heavy within the communes. 60,000 'backyard steel furnaces' were set up in towns and villages. Each one was only capable of making a couple tons of steel, but with the propaganda propelling people forward they were producing 11 million tons of steel, which was a 65% increase from the total in 1957.

3. Give examples of two legal methods and two examples of force Mao used to achieve his aims.

Legal:

-Propaganda

-The First Five-Year Plan

Force:

-Cooperatives: Families were forced into groups of 200-300 families. Families weren't paid for the use of their land, received wages only for their labor, were forced to surrender title deeds for their land and equipment and animals.

-Aftermath of 'The Hundred Flowers': Mao's critics while free speech was permitted were soon sent to camps in the country for "thought reform", some were fired from their jobs. Free speech was forbidden and press was censored.

4. Explain the cause-and-effect relationship between the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Three Bitter Years".

The basic problem of the "Great Leap Forward" was that it pushed for too much, and consequently things broke down. Overused factories lead to machines that were too old and overwork falling apart under strain, working falling asleep and being injured due to exhaustion-related accidents. The Backyard Steel campaign took a large number of workers, which took people out of the fields and reduced what could be grown; then, most of the steel produced was useless and had to be thrown away because the peasants didn't know how to produce it correctly. The coal that the B.S.C. took also lead to a shortage in the country's supplies, so railways were inoperative. The farming crisis also arose from the Great Leap Forward. The harvest in 1958 was poor because so many people were taken from the fields to pursue the new industrial goals, and because Party officials falsely claimed that the grain harvest was 260 million tons (perhaps to increase morale or appease Mao), which lead to communal eating halls giving peasants too-generous meals and using up food stocks. With the bad harvest of 1959 and all the chaos of the G.L.F.'s failure, there was a famine that killed 9 million people just in 1960.

5. Please give three examples from the reading of Mao using propaganda to achieve his aims.

- Lying about production: The government presumably lied about how much grain had been produced because it wanted to encourage the workers to do even more and exceed what they were doing at the time.

- Broadcasting: The use of loudspeakers playing patriotic songs and speeches that encouraged workers to meet and exceed the plans of the second 5 Year Plan was an effective propaganda method.

- Personal involvement: To make people even more enthusiastic about working for the Communists, Mao himself and members of the Politburo would come in and join in the work of building the dam in Beijing.

Mao's Aims

1. Increase industrial output

2. Make china a single party state

3. Gain support from the USSR

4. Rebuild China and build support from peasants and commoners

5. Improve agriculture so China can feed its people

6. Get and maintain power -->

7. Build China into a military superpower

Essay

"Mao's use of terrror and propaganda were his most effective methods of winning support from the peasants".

Based on the following sources, to what extent to you agree with that claim?

The sources presented give slightly different perceptions of how Mao won the peasants over, and it seems that each gives evidence for different parts of these claims. I agree with this claim to a great extent based on what these sources provide for historical facts.

According to chapter 10 of source A, "China Since 1900", Mao used propaganda to spread communist ideas in Northern China. For example, there is a propaganda poster issued in 1944 which shows peasants helping the Red Army in the war against Japan. This piece of propaganda would instill the idea that all peasants were eager and ready to serve the Communists, presumably because the Reds would help them in return. What could also be interpreted as evidence of propaganda is other movements that the source references, such as the "Women's Associations" which did things like helping women to free themselves of abusive husbands. It might have been in the dogma of the party, but it certainly didn't hurt the communists in winning support from women (peasant or not, one would think). However, this source makes it seem as if terror wasn't used to keep peasants in line at all: it specifically states that the Red Army "operated under strict discipline...never treating the peasants badly". It also states that when the people of Yanan were forced to flee to caves after the town was bombed, "the top leaders of the communist party lived in the caves and did not have any special luxuries that the common people did not have". So, this source indicates that while propaganda was used, terror was not.

This excerpt from "Modern World History" also indicates that terror was not used to keep the peasants in line. It states that the Communists won the people over by land reform instead: "they seized the estates of rich landlords and redistributed them among the peasants". It could be argued that Mao used violence to win support from the peasants, but violence (or force) against the landlords. Rich landlords had their land taken from them and the land was then redistributed to the peasants. This action makes sense with the Communist policy, so it doesn't qualify as propaganda; however, the fact that there was a series of droughts and bad harvests in 1930, and "plenty of rice and wheat being hoarded in the cities by profiteering merchants", so the timing of land redistribution was surely helpful to winning the people over. Not so much propaganda as strategically placed execution of policy.

Source C, an excerpt from "China Conquered", argues something quite different from sources A and B, claiming that Mao primarily used terror and violence in order to scare the peasants into supporting him. According to this source, anybody who was not with the Reds was a target for Mao's "mercilessness": an example of this was the blockade of Changchun, a nationalist-held city in Manchuria in 1948 which resulted in the deaths of 120,000 civilians (by the Communists' own watered-down count). In addition, young men were drafted forcibly into the Reds' army or into "hard, dangerous labor at the front". Many peasants lost their houses to the needs of the army such as fuel for fires and "materials for building bridges". There was also class warfare evident -- anybody who did not take place in the brutal violence against the landlords was considered a dissenter and would be punished accordingly: "anyone not active in denouncing landlords will be stoned to death". This source seems to say that propaganda was not necessary, because the peasants were terrorized into doing anything that the Communists wanted.

It is hard to come to a definitive conclusion based on these sources, because each seems to give a slightly different interpretation of what happened. However, based on them I would say that Mao used violence and propaganda as his main methods of winning peasants over.

HW #6

1. Explain three tactics/methods Mao used to conquer China and secure power acording to this source.

1

Starvation: In the city of Changchun, which was held by Nationalists, the Communists imposed a blockade. This led to the deaths of at least 120,000 people from starvation, citizens who were not necessarily Nationalists themselves. The only people allowed to go free were those of value to the Reds, usually rich people, doctors, etc. Mao used the starvation and deprivation to entice Nationalists over to the Reds.

Psychological Warfare: The Reds used loudspeakers to assault starving Nationalist soldiers, taunting them with the fact that they had food -- promising things like pancakes when the Nationalist soldiers were literally reduced to eating their own shoe soles and leather belts.

Class Warfare: Reds used the landlords as scapegoats to incite peasants in their favor. The "land reform" was actually as the source puts it, "violence against the relatively better-off". There were rallies where peasants were forced to watch terrible acts of violence against the landlords. Where there was no violence, obstruction of the land reform movement was cited as the reason.

2. What are three major differences between the way this source portrays the Communists' treatment of the common people with other sources we've read?

This source differs from the other sources we have studied in its basic depiction of the Communists.

1. "China Since 1900" generally depicts the Communists as helpful to and admired by the peasants and commoners, leaving out details of mistreatment. For the most part, the book doesn't mention things such as the starvation of the city of Changchun and all the civilian casualties. According to the chapter "China Conquered", when a direct assault against Changchun failed Mao ordered his armies to starve it into surrender; he banned civilians from leaving the city, so attempts at evacuation were fruitless. Over 5 months, the civilian population had dropped to 170,000 from half a million; even the 'watered-down' estimates of the CCP put the deaths to 120,000 people. The intention of this was to force the defending troops to surrender, and it was a tactic used in multiple cities.

2. Exploitation of civilians is generally not recorded in "China in 1900"; the book claims that the Reds actually won civilians over by including them in the army, but "Mao" claims that civilians were forced. Accroding to the book, in Manchuria the Reds conscripted 1.6 million laborers. These people were used to do "frontline tasks" such as transporting ammunition and the wounded and dismantling fortifications. Women had to care for wounded, mend uniforms, make shoes and cook for troops and laborers. Households had to hand over a designated amount of food, which amounted to 225 million kg of grain just in the Huai-Hai Campaign.

3. The Red use of psychological warfare is not referenced in "China in 1900". Because nationalists were constanstly in short of food, they relied on unreliable methods of getting it, such as supplies brought by railway and airlifts. Nationalist Army members resorted to eating tree bark, killing each other for airlifted food, and eating their belts and shoe soles. To take advantage of this, the Reds used loudspeakers to entice the Nationalists, promising "pancakes" and other food.

3. Explain at least two practices of the Chinese Civil War you learned from this source.

1. Exploitation of peasants: Many peasants in addition to being drafted lost their houses, 'pulled down to provide fuel for cookies and materials for building bridges". I was under the impression that the Reds got the peoples' support through their policies and didn't exploit them.

2. Class Warfare as propaganda: The Reds essentially forced the peasants into "struggle against the landlords". There was organized violence against the relatively better-off, in which targets were made to stand facing crowds which were "psyched up to come forward and pour out their grievances against them...the crowds would then be led to shout slogans while brandishing fists and farm tools". If peasants weren't participating, they were considered reactionaries and would be punished. This also counts as terror as a method to control peasants.

4. The Communists fought a "total war." Cite two pieces of evidence from this passage that support that view.

1. Everyone was a target: The starvation of cities such as Changchun prove that the Communists were fighting a total war, because they didn't limit their targets to Nationalists alone. Civilians who could be uninvolved, nationalists, or even in support of the communists were starved because of their location, in an attempt by the Reds to subdue the Nationalists,

2. Economy/people re-geared towards war: The peasants' lives were changed drastically by the war, because the Communists brought them forcibly into the conflict: peasants in communist-run areas were conscripted as laborers for the army, crops went to the communists, and even houses were pulled down in order to provide for the needs of the communist army.

5. According to this source, what part of land reform really mattered to Mao?

According to this source, the real reason for land reform was to incite violence rather than to improve anybody's lot or redistribute land. The source claims that the appointment of Kang Sheng by Mao, "a man who was an expert not in agrarian reform, but in terror (and who knew nothing about land issues)" proves that Mao was not truly interested in creating land reform that was advantageous for the people.

6. Mao's main aim was to secure power, not to improve the lives of the peasants. To what extent do you agree with that claim?

Based on this source, I do agree with that claim to a great extent. Mao touted the Communist mantra of reform and doing things for the betterment of peoples' lives; however, peasants truly suffered just as much under Mao as they would under the Nationalists. Peasants were conscripted into the Red Army to do dangerous tasks; their supplies were taken to support the Reds, sometimes having their homes torn down for fuel and other needs; and peasants who didn't actively participate in "land reform" were killed just as if they were landowners. If Mao's true aim were to give the peasants better lives, then so many of them wouldn't have suffered in trying to attain that goal.

HW #2

For Tuesday, 2/2, identify three major land, air or sea practices of the Chinese Civil War. (Write a paragraph on each)

Reading to complete HW 2: China Since 1900 Chapters 5-11; Modern World History 409-414

Three Major Land Practices of CCW:

Taking Cities:

The Red army was inferior to the Nationalists in terms of manpower and supplies, which made them an easier target for the Nationalist Army. and had suffered through the war. In order to eliminate the Communist threat, Chiang Kaisheck would attack and capture Communist-held cities. The Guomingdang army attacked Red-controlled Shanghai, and Chiang Kaisheck ordered all the communists rounded up and killed. This happened again in Guangzhou later that year, and forced thousands of Communists into the country. This strategic use of the nationalist army's superior power led to Communists being expelled from nearly all the major cities. The Reds retreated to the Jiangxi and Hunan countrysides where they had less influence over government matters. This also put Chiang Kaisheck himself in control of cities and "at the head of the government in Nanjing, now... ready to conquer the rest of China.

Extermination Campaigns:

Kaisheck had not managed to gain control of the Jiangxi province, because when the Communists fled to the province they won the support of the peasantry. Chiang Kaisheck considered this even more of a threat to his power than warlords or bandits, so he launched the Extermination Campaigns (1930-34). His army outnumbered the Reds. The first four were failures because he sent his armies directly into Red territory, but in the fifth campaign he used a new method of attack advised to him from General Hans von Seeckt of Germany. This tactic was similar to the trench warfare of WWI: the Nationalist armies surrounded the Jiangxi soviet and slowly moved forward while building blockhouses and digging trenches and putting up barbed wire fences. This was highly successful, and by October 1934 the Communists had lost over half their territory, 60,000 soldiers, were running out of food and fuel and weapons and ammo, and their territory was still being taken.

Guerilla Warfare:

Although the Red Army was smaller than the Nationalist army, the first four Extermination Campagins against the Reds were failures because the Reds successfully employed guerilla warfare tactics. In the first four extermination campaigns, the Reds never fought the Nationalists head to head; rather they lured them into Communist territory and then attacked each Guomingdang unit separately, "knocking them out in deadly ambushes". Mao's guerilla tactics that he controlled his army with were:

1. "When the enemy advances, we retreat!"

2. "When the enemy halts and encamps, we trouble them!"

3. 'When the enemy seeks to avoid a battle, we attack!"

4. 'When the enemy retreats, we pursue!"

These tactics met criticism because they allowed the Nationalists to take peasant villages as they went through the territory, which ultimately led to the deaths of more than a million peasants. However, these tactics were highly effective because they were used to outwit the plans of the Nationalist Army successfully, even though the nationalists were superior in numbers.