POST-WAR PERIOD of

NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION

For a colorful and enlightening look at the revolutionary ideals espoused by the CCP in this period, please take a look at " Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages" http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/index.html.  Lots of class-struggling fun!

Political Change in the “Golden Age” of Chinese Socialism (1950-58)

Liu Shaoqi (1898-1969): chairman of the People's Republic of China (1959-68) and chief political theorist for the CCP, who was considered Mao Zedong's successor until he was purged during the Cultural Revolution.

Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997): Chinese communist leader who would become best known for "opening" the People's Republic of China to the West in the late 1970s and for leading the country's reform program until his death in 1997.

“Three Anti’s” (waste, corruption, and "red tape") Campaign (1951-52)

Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971): leader of the Soviet Union (1958-64), who launched a program of de-Stalinization in his own nation that aggravated Sino-Soviet tensions.

The Korean War (1950-1953): conflict between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea) that resulted in an estimated 3,000,000 causalities.  UN forces, under US leadership, supported the South, while the PRC and the Soviets supported the North.

One Hundred Flowers Movement and its Aftermath

100 Flowers Reforms (May 1956-June 1957): the Party-sponsored reform campaign that started with the slogan "Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend." Mao himself indicated that intellectuals could speak freely about perceived mistakes of the CCP.  When criticism became too intense, Mao reversed course and launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign (July 1957) to clamp down on dissent.

Great Leap Forward (1958-61): The CCP's second Five Year Plan, which became a campaign of mass mobilization to organize China's population into large-scale communes to meet the country's industrial and agricultural goals.  The “Backyard furnaces” became a lasting symbol of this period of economic radical collectivization.

Peng Dehuai (1898-1974): a military hero from the pre-1949 period and minister of national defense of China from 1954 until 1959, who was removed after the Lushan Conference (July 1959) for criticizing Mao's military and economic policies.