In 2009 they celecbrated the 60th birthday of the PRC. Is it the same PRC it was in 1949? Certainly not. Just as you are not the same as when you were born. However when you were born no doubt there were certain expectations of what you would be like. You were likely to have brown eyes maybe, or a proclivity for dance. Maybe you were expected to be very intelligent or athletic.
What were the expectations of the PRC at its birth? How does it hold up now in 2012? Is it what Mao would have expected? Is it what the West would have expected?
The birth of the PRC. Several interesting things to note here. 1, yet another perspective on the Korean war. What’s different here?
2 – how does the PRC establish itself? How does land reform work? WhAt of the three anti and five anti campaign? What about women’s rights. Why was this at all successful?
3 – a couple new people in your terms. Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. Who are they and what are they up to?
Women got a lot of new rights from a new marriage law in 1950 that gave unmarried, divorced, or widowed women the right to hold lands in their names. This meant that women would be able to support themselves and would not be forced to marry some guy just to survive. If a person do not have land with which to live on (a home) one has no ability to work. The woman in the video was super happy about the wave of rights women were getting because of the revolution, and it makes sense, Spence describes women as having lives of “bondage.” That sounds like a not-so-fun way to live.
According to Spence, “Zhou furthered ties with India and had amicable talks with Prime Minister U Nu in Burma, all under the newly coined slogan of “Peaceful Coexistence”". (553) Zhou Enlai helped established China’s diplomacy at national meetings with other world powers. Zhou also was a prominent political figure at the Bandung conference in 1955.
According to Wikipedia, Zhou Enlai served under Mao Zedong and was instrumental in consolidating the control of the Communist Party’s rise to power, forming foreign policy, and developing the Chinese economy.
I thought Mao’s land reform policy was vital to the well being of China because people were actually making money and eating adequately. I also thought that it was laying important groundwork to the economy.
How it works: It is described as cooperative organization. Peasants agreed to mutual-aid prgrams. They work the land, they get food and money, and so does the governments. I also saw distinct classes b/t rich peasants and poor ones, etc. A significant change was when the strips between plots were abolished and up to 50 familes worked on the same land. Drastic improvement. I also thought it was interesting that Spence describes it as semisocialist b/c richer peasant with bigger land received greater reward.
Nao took this arrangement away b/c he was afraid that of the surge in private production. It would creat a traditional 2-3 class system in which a new genration of enriched peasants would prosper off the poor ones.
*Mao
The way the Korean War is portrayed in this chapter is similar to Kissinger and Ambrose but something I found in this point of view different from the others is the fact that many of the “volunteers” were scared when they were about to attack the Americans.
The Three-Anti Campaign was basically a campaign set against three set of vices stated to be common among three occupational groups, the three vices were corruption, waste, and obstructionist bureaucracy, the groups consisted of Communist members themselves, the wider circles of bureaucratic officials, and the managers of factories and other businesses. The Five-Anti Campaign basically was set out as an all assault on the bourgeoisie in China. Both of these had an immense effect, but the ultimate goal of the campaigns were to assert government control over worker’s organizations, basically ending independent modes of operation of capitalists and bureaucratic functionaries.
Well I took some time to look up who Liu Shaoqi was and he seems like an interesting person. He was with the Chinese revolution. He had moved up quickly to become a senior leader of the CCP. His little quick rise to had made him the second in comand for the enitre revolution under Mao. In the later years of the revolution Liu and Mao had conflicting ideas this made Mao distrust him. Lui is labeled as a traitor along with others and removed from the party.
My knowledge of CHina nowadays is that there is no freedom of speech, not even an illusion of it. This is evident in many different occasions, but one is Tiananmen square, where the rights of speech and assembly and protest were not granted, instead the protesters were shot at and killed. Therefore, i found it interesting that Article 5 of the COmmon Program “guaranteed to all, except for ‘political reactionaries,’ the rights of freedom of ‘thought, speech, publication, assembly, association, correspondence, person, domicile, moving from one place to another, religious belief, and the freedom to hold processions and demonstrations.’” Although they guarantee humane rights, they found themselves a loophole to be able to ignore these rights, just by labeling those they disagreed with as “political reactionaries”, which means the government can strip them of their rights. I found this very interesting and a sharp contrast with the United States and their policy on human rights
Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai along with Mao Zedong, Zhu De and Chen Yun made the five-man “standing committee”. Their committee ran the members of the Politburo. Liu Shaoqi was 50 years old and was educated in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. He became known because of his influence as a masterful labor organizer. In addition, in the early 1940s he became a leading figure in organizing Communists groups in areas under Japanese occupation. One fact about Liu Shaoqi that stood out to me was that he wrote a short book, “How to Be a Good Communist,” became a staple reading for Communist cadres in the 1940s and 1950s and the book was a mixture of Confucian traditions with the discipline of Marx and Lenin (520). Zhou Enlai was premier of the State Council of the Central People’s Government Council. Zhou was in charge of 24 different ministries. Even though foreign affairs is included in that 24 ministries, Zhou was also minister of foreign affairs. One thing I found interesting was that two ministers of the ministries were women.
It seems as though the basis of the new Chinese ideals and ways of thinking are skewed, meaning that they don’t exactly represent the “equality” that one would assume. The whole idea of communism is based off of everyone being the same, having the same, and doing their part for society as a whole. When reading these last few chapters, they reveal that the people are willing to do whatever it is that they need to ensure this so called “equality”. They CCP is quoted to have “encouraged violent confrontations between landlords and their tenants” to promote the destruction of a superior working classes.