Cultural Revolution and Mao ‘radical Military Essay

Submitted By eboniea
Words: 506
Pages: 3

Event
Positive and/or Negative effects of the event.
Land For Peasants
1950 - 1953
Work teams sent to help villagers organise and train peasants.
Peasants were able to sustain more land, lived better.
Loyalty to the CCP increased.
Greedy landlords got their money, grain, tools and animals taken off them and given the amout of land equivalent to that given to poor peasants.

Landlords brutally bashed and executed.
Five Year Plan
1953
Emphasised a thoroughly planned economy and development of heavy industry.
Growth rates between 30-60% a year.
People received food, clothing and housing according to their needs.

Backyard steel mills a few tons of low quality and basically worthless steel.
Because peasants were urged to devote their energies to industry; the economy began to fall apart
Cooperatives 1955-1957
Peasants farms were together in mutual aid.
Semi-cooperatives pooled their land together and worked it collectively.
Communism In The Cities, Privatisation. 1955
Capitalist businesses taken over by government and privatised.

Businessmen lost their independence and control over profits.
Some managers purposely let their equipment run down or be wrecked before handing over to the Government.
Woman’s Rights
Grated the right to choose their own marriage partners, could divorce, men could only have one wife, killing baby girls was made illegal.
Men and woman were equal.

Women where not in a better state because they were starved.
100 Flowers Campaign 1956
Studied Marxism
Gave a chance for the people to speak

Mao was shocked by the anit-communist criticism.
Mao cracked down on ‘anti revolutionary bourgeois’ people and arrested and transported them to the countryside.
People thought it was a deliberate trap.
War In Korea
Disaster for the Chinese economy.
Threatened by America to be invaded and caused 20 years of hostility with America.
Starvation, Autumn 1958-62
Not enough peasants left to harvest the crops.
Communes offered generous meals to the workers and used up their food stocks.
Between 1959 – 1962 over 20 million died due to famine.
Great Leap Fails
1958
Relationship with Soviet Union cracks when Stalin dies 1953.
Soviets regard the GL as a waist of their aid and an abandonment