China under Mao: party-state, planning and mass campaigns (1949–1976)

Background

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won the civil war against the Nationalists and proclaimed the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing on 1 October 1949. Its leaders had governed rural base areas for two decades and brought a Leninist organisation, a peasant army and a doctrine of "mass line" mobilisation to the task of ruling a country of more than half a billion people devastated by war. In the early 1950s they copied much of the Soviet model, with Soviet advisers, loans and industrial plants.

How it was governed

• Party over state. Power sat in the CCP Politburo and its Standing Committee, chaired by Mao Zedong. Parallel party committees shadowed every ministry, province, factory and village, and the party controlled appointments through a list of posts (the nomenklatura). The 1954 Constitution created a National People's Congress, but it ratified decisions taken elsewhere.
• Army and security. The People's Liberation Army answered to the party's Military Affairs Commission. Public security organs and a system of labour camps (laogai) handled "counter-revolutionaries".
• Cells of everyday control. Urban residents belonged to work units (danwei) that supplied jobs, housing, rations and political supervision. Household registration (hukou), formalised in 1958, tied people to their place of residence and separated rural from urban citizens.
• Campaigns as a method. Policy was often carried out through campaigns: land reform (1950–52), the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries (1950–51), the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns against corruption and business (1951–52), the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957) that followed the brief Hundred Flowers invitation to criticism, and later the Cultural Revolution. Campaigns set quotas for targets and rewarded zeal, which made excess predictable.

How far this was a party regime and how far a personal dictatorship is debated. Formal bodies met and voted, but Mao repeatedly overrode or bypassed them, purged colleagues who disagreed (Peng Dehuai in 1959, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in 1966) and in the Cultural Revolution turned mobilised students against the party apparatus itself.

Economy

Land reform redistributed land and destroyed the landlord class, often through public "struggle" meetings and executions. The First Five-Year Plan (1953–57) built heavy industry under central planning; a state monopoly over grain purchase and sale from 1953 let the state extract grain at fixed prices to feed cities and industry. Agriculture was collectivised in 1955–56, and in 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, merging collectives into giant people's communes with communal kitchens, mobilising labour for water works and backyard steel furnaces, and demanding impossible output targets.

Local cadres reported inflated harvests; the state set procurement on the basis of those reports. When Defence Minister Peng Dehuai criticised the Leap at the Lushan meeting in July 1959, he was purged and a new campaign against "right opportunism" made further honest reporting dangerous. Grain was still exported and procured while villagers starved. The famine peaked in 1960; policy was relaxed in 1961–62.

Feedback and accountability

The system had no independent press, courts, opposition or elections through which bad news could reach the top or bad leaders be removed. Economists have tested which institutional features turned a harvest shortfall into mass death. Justin Yifu Lin argued that removing the right to exit collectives in autumn 1958 destroyed the self-enforcing work discipline on which collective farming depended. Xin Meng, Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared show that mortality was higher in regions with higher food production per person, a pattern unique to the famine years, and attribute it to an inflexible procurement system that could not adjust to actual output. These accounts differ in mechanism but agree that policy, not weather alone, caused the famine.

Repression and rights

Repression was systematic. Hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were labelled "rightists" in 1957 and many were sent to labour camps for two decades. In the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) Red Guards persecuted teachers, officials and "class enemies"; factional armed conflict followed, and the army was sent in. Andrew Walder and Yang Su, using 1,520 county annals, estimate 750,000 to 1.5 million deaths in rural China, a similar number permanently injured and 36 million people subjected to some form of political persecution, with most casualties occurring in 1968–71, after order had been restored, during campaigns run by the new local organs of power.

Outcomes

• Famine. Estimates of excess deaths in 1959–61 range from 16.5 to 45 million. Demographers Ashton, Hill, Piazza and Zeitz (1984) put the figure near 30 million; Yang Jisheng, a former Xinhua journalist, estimates about 36 million; Frank Dikötter, working in party archives, at least 45 million. Kung and Lin note that the national death rate roughly doubled from just under 12 per thousand in 1958 to about 25 per thousand in 1960.
• Industrial base. The period created an industrial and military-industrial base, including nuclear weapons (first test 1964), and expanded basic health care and schooling from a low starting point, achievements that the reform era built on.
• The party's own verdict. The CCP's 1981 Resolution on party history called the Cultural Revolution "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses" since 1949 and placed chief responsibility on Mao, while judging his merits "primary" overall. It attributed the economic difficulties of 1959–61 mainly to the Leap's errors, natural calamities and the Soviet withdrawal, and gave no death toll.

Mao died on 9 September 1976; in October his closest radical allies, the "Gang of Four", were arrested, opening the way to the reform era.

Debates

• How many died and why. Death-toll differences come from assumptions about baseline mortality and fertility; the causal debate concerns procurement, exit rights, local radicalism and information distortion. The official narrative's emphasis on natural disasters is not supported by the demographic and economic evidence.
• Was democracy the missing safeguard? Amartya Sen has argued that famines do not occur in functioning democracies with a free press and opposition, citing China in 1958–61. Others question how general the claim is. It is best treated as a strong hypothesis rather than a law.
• Party regime or personal rule? Typologies that code China as a party-based regime sit uneasily with Mao's capacity to dismantle the party apparatus in 1966–68.

Lessons for institution design

• Information needs protection. When reporting a bad harvest is punishable, a state's statistics become fiction and its plans lethal.
• Exit and voice matter even in collectives. Removing the option to leave a collective, and punishing dissent within it, removed the signals that could have stopped the disaster.
• Campaign quotas produce excess. Targets for "enemies" or output, enforced by careers, reliably overshoot.
• Concentrated power defeats formal rules. Party statutes did not constrain a leader willing to mobilise outside them.

Further reading

• Andrew G. Walder, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard University Press, 2015)
• Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2006)
• Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)
• Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine (Walker/Bloomsbury, 2010)
• Xin Meng, Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared, "The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959–1961", Review of Economic Studies (2015)