History of the People's Republic of China

The People's Republic of China (simplified Chinese: 中华人民共和国, traditional Chinese: 中華人民共和國, pinyin: Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó) is the republic currently exercising sovereignty over mainland China and the from Hong Kong and Macau. The People's Republic was proclaimed in 1949, when the forces of the Communist Party of China, under the leadership of Mao Zedong (also spelled Mao Tse Tung), imposed themselves on the army of the Republic of China, the former Chinese regime, which has since been has remained on the island of Taiwan, which was under the government of the Republic of China since 1949. Mao Zedong (1949-1976), Deng Xiaoping (1978-1989), Jiang Zemin (1989-2002) have served as supreme leader of the country.), Hu Jintao (2002-2012) and Xi Jinping (2012-present), while Hua Guofeng briefly acted as the country's leader during a transitional period (1976-1978).

The history of the People's Republic of China can be divided into two clearly differentiated stages. The first was dominated by the figure of Mao Tse Tung, who defended a revolutionary vision of communism in which all aspects of society, culture, economy and politics should be at the service of the ideological cause. Mao's radical policies led to moments of crisis in which other Party leaders would question his authority, attempting to remove Mao from government work, moments in which Mao reacted by launching intense campaigns of ideological reaffirmation. Among these campaigns, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution deserve special mention, whose effects on Chinese society would be felt for a long time. After Mao's death in 1976, his successor Hua Guofeng will end up ceding power to Deng Xiaoping, a pragmatic leader who will put an end to revolutionary policies and, maintaining the centralist and authoritarian character of the State, will launch a series of reforms that would initiate a process of intense economic growth.

In the late 1980s, growing freedom of expression led to voices critical of the regime beginning to emerge, which would culminate in the massive protests of 1989. On June 4 of that year, the Tian Square protests #39;anmen in Beijing were put down through the intervention of the Army. The incidents of 1989, in which hundreds of people lost their lives, caused a change in the leadership of the People's Republic. Deng Xiaoping pushed aside reformist leaders such as Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and favored Premier Li Peng and, most especially, the then mayor of Shanghai Jiang Zemin, who would become his successor. After two years of uncertainty and international isolation, Deng Xiaoping made one of the most important decisions in China's recent history by intensifying the process of economic reforms. Thus, the State dominated by the Communist Party began to adopt capitalist economic policies combined with strong political authoritarianism during the 1990s. This development model would be continued by Jiang Zemin and his successor, Hu Jintao, and the current president of the People's Republic of China, Xi Jinping.

The era of Mao Zedong (1949-1976)

Proclamation of the People's Republic

On October 1, 1949, at the end of the Chinese civil war, when the Kuomintang nationalists only controlled some cities in the south, the leader of the Communist Party of China Mao Tse Tung proclaimed the People's Republic of China from the Tiananmen Gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing. In December of that year, the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek abandoned Chengdu, the last mainland city held by the nationalists, who would take refuge on the island of Taiwan.

The coming to power of the communists put an end to decades of wars and conflicts. The new Government of the People's Republic had to assume a costly and difficult task of national reconstruction.

The structure of the new State had been decided during the Popular Political Consultative Conference convened by Mao on September 12 of that year. In addition to the organic law that established the powers of the State, during the conference a Common Program was drawn up, which listed a series of immediate objectives, and it was decided to adopt the country's new flag, red with a large yellow star representing the Communist Party, around which are placed four other smaller stars, which symbolize the union of the four social classes: the peasants, the workers, the petite bourgeoisie and the big urban bourgeoisie.

The new State was under the total control of the Communist Party through its regional organizations, coordinated by a Central Committee that at that time had forty-four members. Of these, fourteen members formed the Political Bureau, headed by the five members of the Permanent Committee, on whom the maximum responsibility for power fell. The initial five members of the Standing Committee, the real strongmen of the new regime, were Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Chen Yun.

The stability of the new regime was based on its military power. The armed forces of the new State, the People's Liberation Army, guaranteed the supremacy of the Party. Chinese territory was divided into six military regions from which some of the most influential leaders of the Party, such as Gao Gang or Peng Dehuai, controlled regional politics.

One of the main priorities of the new Government would be economic reconstruction. To do this, China sought the collaboration of the Soviet Union, the only powerful ally it could count on. Mao Tse Tung visited Moscow in December 1949, where he met with Soviet leader Stalin. The Soviet Union offered China various economic and technological cooperation programs, as well as loans, to support the country's industrialization.

One of the main policies undertaken from the beginning was agrarian reform, which involved the redistribution of lands confiscated from the largest landowners. Social reforms were also undertaken, such as the new marriage law, which gave greater rights to women. Likewise, plans were carried out to eradicate prostitution and opium addiction.

Along with social and economic reforms, the other national priority for the communists was the reestablishment of Chinese territorial integrity. Hainan Island was occupied by the People's Liberation Army in April 1950, while Tibet, de facto independent since the fall of the Qing dynasty, was occupied in October 1950.

However, Mao Tse Tung would have to give in to Stalin's pressure to recognize the independence of the Mongolian People's Republic, known in China as Outer Mongolia, which had been part of the Qing empire, the last Chinese dynasty. With the recognition of the independence of Mongolia, the only territory claimed by the People's Republic that remained outside its control was the island of Taiwan, refuge of the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Mao Tse Tung hoped to invade the island before the end of 1950. The invasion plans would, however, be frustrated by the Korean War.

In 1949, the Communist Party promoted a literacy policy (only 20% of the population could read in 1949, compared to 80% thirty years later).

The Korean War

On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. The United Nations passed a resolution authorizing the sending of a multinational force to repel the North Korean invasion. Paradoxically, this resolution was able to be approved thanks to the Soviet boycott of the United Nations, motivated precisely by the presence of the Republic of China (Taiwan) in that organization.

Under the flag of the United Nations, a multinational force from numerous countries, with the majority of troops from the United States, intervened in the Korean War in support of the southern regime. United States President Harry S. Truman, concerned about the possibility of communist expansion in East Asia, ordered the Navy's Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to prevent the feared invasion of the People's Liberation Army. The American presence in the strait made the Beijing Government's invasion plans unviable.

Although the People's Republic of China remained neutral at the beginning of the war, the entry of the multinational force into North Korea led Mao, encouraged by Peng Dehuai and Gao Gang, to order Chinese intervention in support of the North Korean regime. The entry into the conflict of the People's Liberation Army, commanded by Peng Dehuai, repelled the advance of the forces led by the United States.

The war would end with the truce signed in July 1953. The situation was once again practically identical to that before the beginning of the conflict, and China was thus able to save the North Korean regime. The price in human lives was very high for China. Although exact figures are not known, it is estimated that nearly one million Chinese soldiers (officially 'volunteers') lost their lives in Korea, including Mao Zedong's own eldest son, Mao Anying.

The Korean War would mark the subsequent development of the new Chinese regime. On the one hand, the American presence in the Taiwan Strait confirmed the political separation between mainland China and Taiwan. In addition, the People's Republic distanced itself from the United States and Western countries, while strengthening its relationship with the Soviet Union. The war mobilization also served to promote the revolutionary spirit characteristic of the Maoist ideology, which would have its expression in the frequent massive campaigns of social mobilization. These campaigns used propaganda posters and simple slogans to instill in the population the spirit of sacrifice necessary to achieve the political objectives set by the regime. Thus, the movement supporting the war in Korea was called the 'Resist America and Help Korea' campaign. During it, in addition to military support for the North Korean regime, numerous foreign citizens living in China were persecuted, generally accused of espionage. This persecution of foreigners, particularly Westerners, who would leave the country, would be one more manifestation of the international isolationism of the new regime.

Transformation to socialism

Mass campaigns

During the Korean War, three more mass campaigns would take place. By 1953, China's land reform had been completed, but a total of at least one million landowners had been killed. The reform was not carried out peacefully, as encouraged by Mao Zedong. At the same time, in 1951, the 'Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries' was launched, in which small businessmen and landowners accused of not collaborating with the Communist Party would be persecuted. At the end of that same year, another mass campaign, the Three Anti Movement (anti-corruption, anti-waste and anti-bureaucracy), aimed at Party cadres, spread to the entire country, after having been launched in Manchuria under the supervision of Gao Gang, the military leader of the region. This campaign was complemented by the Anti-Five Movement, aimed at the urban bourgeoisie, which sought to eradicate bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, breach of contracts and the revelation of state economic secrets. In 1955, he launched the 'Sufan Movement', aimed at counterrevolutionaries such as non-communist intellectuals. As a result of these campaigns, the Communist Party would extend its control over the productive means and, much more significantly, over the population itself, which had seen the forcefulness of the actions against those who were classified as enemies of the people. These methods of propaganda and ideological indoctrination would be used again in other campaigns.

The First Five-Year Plan

After the end of the Korean War, collaboration with the Soviet Union was greatly reinforced, and the leaders of the People's Republic of China decided to commit to the Soviet model of development. This model was based on the planned economy, focused on heavy industry and agricultural production. As in the Soviet Union, it was decided to apply a five-year plan that established growth objectives in agricultural and industrial production for the following five years. Although the period covered by the plan included the years between 1953 and 1957, the inexperience and lack of technical knowledge of senior Chinese government officials and Party officials would delay its start until February 1955.

Despite all the difficulties, Soviet collaboration and political stability allowed China to achieve high economic growth during these years. This did not stop, however, the political convulsions typical of the Maoist era, which would occur without pause during this period. Thus, in 1954, the first purge took place within the Party itself. The until then powerful soldiers Gao Gang, responsible for the Manchuria military region, and Rao Shushi, first secretary of the Party in the Eastern China region, were removed from their positions after having criticized the policies of Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi, who led the day-to-day tasks of government. This first struggle for power would end with the suicide of Gao Gang and the imprisonment of Rao Shushi. Furthermore, the crisis showed how the extensive powers of the leaders of the military regions, such as Gao and Rao, could pose a threat to the authority of the central power. Therefore, in order to reinforce central authority, that same year the six military regions were abolished, and the administrative division of the country was restructured. Under the command of the central power, China was divided into twenty-two provinces (twenty-three with Taiwan), five autonomous regions linked to ethnic minorities, and two municipalities, Beijing and Shanghai, administered directly by the central government, a division that has been maintained to the present day. with slight variations (Hainan Island, then part of Guangzhou, is currently a province, and Tianjin and Chongqing, then in Hebei and Sichuan respectively, are now municipalities under direct administration of the central government).

During the First Five Year Plan, the system of cooperatives was also introduced in the rural world, through which extensions of crops until then divided into small private plots became grouped to share resources. Cooperatives also had significant success. However, the system would arouse the concern of the central government, since it allowed farmers to maintain private ownership of their plots and even have a small part of the production. Suspicion of the spread of capitalist practices that, according to official ideology, had to be eradicated, would give rise to much more radical forms of agrarian collectivization in the following years.

In 1956, during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, attended by party general secretary Deng Xiaoping and Politburo Standing Committee member Zhu De, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev attacked the policies of the late Stalin and announced the introduction of changes in the way the Soviet Union was governed. The attacks on Stalin's memory and the announced change of course in Soviet policy sowed confusion among the Chinese communist leaders, who were struggling with doubts regarding the path that the Chinese regime should follow.

Anti-right Movement

After seven years of communist regime, disagreements were beginning to occur between the leaders of the Party and, discreetly, discordant voices with the line of action of the Communist Party were beginning to be heard. Premier Zhou Enlai was in favor of allowing greater freedom of expression to intellectuals so that they could formulate constructive criticism of the Party's management, which would make it possible to better understand the concerns and desires of society as a whole.

It would be Mao Zedong himself who would promote a brief period of greater freedom of expression that became known as the Hundred Flowers Movement. On May 2, 1956, in a private speech to party members, Mao quoted the famous poem "May a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought fight against each other" (百花齐放，百家争鸣 / 百花齊放，百家爭鳴 / bài huā qífàng, bǎi jiā zhēngmíng), which would give its name to the movement. In this way, Mao invited the country's intellectuals to freely express their opinions. Although some historians, especially in the West, have wanted to see a malicious intention in the movement, which would have been a maneuver to unmask those who held critical opinions, it is most likely that the intention was actually to take advantage of the constructive criticism of intellectuals to adapt the government strategy to the needs of society.

However, the Hundred Flowers Movement would be very brief. Contrary to what Mao and the other Party leaders expected, confident that the stability and economic and social achievements in the first years of the regime made it truly popular, the criticism grew in tone and statements were even made. openly anti-communist. Seeing that the situation had led to criticism of the Party and even himself, Mao took a policy turn and launched the Anti-Rightist Movement, one of the most violent Maoist campaigns, during which numerous critics of the regime, who had dared to criticize to the party and Mao, were tortured and executed. In that tragic way, the short experiment with freedom of expression ended and censorship and control of information was tightened.

In the field of cultural policy, in 1956 a committee formed to study the reform of Chinese writing published the first list of simplified characters and introduced the hanyu pinyin romanization system, which some claimed would eventually supplant the Chinese characters. Chinese as a conventional Chinese writing system. The intention of these reforms was to facilitate the literacy of the population.

Along with these profound social and cultural changes that the country was experiencing in the 1950s, the economy continued to grow. The success of the First Five-Year Plan led the Government to design a second, much more ambitious five-year plan for the period between 1958 and 1962. However, Mao Zedong thought that the objectives could be gone even further, and he called for to the total mobilization of the population in order to increase industrial production. This new campaign, known as the Great Leap Forward, would be the greatest economic failure of the Maoist era.

The Great Leap Forward and its aftermath

Despite the outstanding economic growth achieved during the course of the First Five-Year Plan, in 1957 problems began to be perceived in the Soviet development model. On the one hand, heavy investments in technology to develop heavy industry had required large loans from the Soviet Union that China had to repay with interest. This meant increasing debt for the state coffers, at the service of the Soviet Union, which provided technical assistance in the form of machinery and technical experts established in China at a price that the Chinese leaders considered too high. In this sense, the difficult relations between Chinese and Soviet communism were already beginning to show increasing fissures, which would culminate years later in an open conflict.

In addition, the increase in industrial production had also been achieved thanks to the reconversion of many peasants as workers in the new factories. The resulting decline in the agricultural population threatened to cause a decline in agricultural production. The People's Republic thus faced numerous challenges. It was not easy to find a solution that would allow us to continue promoting industrial development while ensuring the supply of food for the population.

Mao thought that the solution to these problems was found in the revolutionary spirit, which made it possible for the masses to join forces in the service of the objectives set by the Party. In this vision of Mao, his personal ideology was once again reflected, which defended the & # 34; continuous revolution & # 34; as a tool of progress and social transformation. According to Mao, the revolutionary spirit should never be allowed to falter. It was precisely moments of weakness or complacency that allowed the ghosts of capitalism to reappear. Faced with any deviation from ideological orthodoxy, the Party and the masses had to always be alert and maintain the mobilizations and revolutionary fervor that made it possible to put the country's human capital at the service of the common good to advance towards the ideal of communism.

This vision of the masses as the engine of development was expressed by Mao in an internal document that circulated among the leaders of the Communist Party in early 1958. In said document, Mao stated that after the various social and economic revolutions that had taken place developed since the founding of the People's Republic, now came the turn of a great technological revolution, in which the efforts of the population had to be dedicated to increasing agricultural and industrial production. In this way, China could even surpass the industrial production figures of the United Kingdom in about fifteen years.

Thus, during 1958 the Chinese population was mobilized to undertake the gigantic challenges of industrial development pointed out by Mao. This new mass campaign, much broader in scope than the previous ones, was called "the Great Leap Forward".

Given that many rural men had to abandon their work in the fields, the growth of agricultural production had to be based on better use of existing resources. The way to achieve this was the creation of the 'popular commune' system, which replaced the cooperatives created a few years before. The 740,000 existing cooperatives in the Chinese countryside became only 26,000 communes, through the merger of dozens of cooperatives. One of the objectives of the creation of the communes was the incorporation of women into intensive work in the countryside, to replace the men who had been sent to work in factories and in infrastructure projects. The communes provided daycare services to care for children, as well as huge soup kitchens that freed women from domestic tasks so they could dedicate themselves to work in the fields.

The Great Leap Forward would thus have profound social effects, separating numerous families, altering the traditional way of life in rural areas.

The consequences of this ambitious project were disastrous. Unrealistic growth expectations meant that Party cadres had to falsify official figures to avoid losing their positions. Furthermore, the effort to increase steel production as a symbol of development led to a crazy demand that families themselves melt down their household objects and utensils to produce more steel. The steel produced was in many cases of poor quality and impossible to use for industrial purposes. All this occurred within the framework of an absence of economic policy that evaluated what the possibilities of using or selling that steel really were. Thus, contrary to the most basic principles of economics, production had become an end in itself, dissociated from the needs of the market. Added to the economic disaster in industrial policy was the failure of the commune project for the rural world. The enormous size of the communes, in which no type of private exploitation was allowed, diluted responsibilities and eliminated the motivation of the men and women who remained in the countryside. Added to the system's own defects was the misfortune of natural disasters, drought and floods, which affected China that year.

Although at the end of 1958 some leaders had already seen the failure of the project and many of the communes were dismantled, returning in many places to the previous cooperative model, the damage had already been done. The retreat undertaken by the government could not prevent the interruption of traditional ways of life and work in the countryside from resulting in a decline in agricultural production between 1958 and 1962, which caused a great famine in many places in China. Although there are many discrepancies in the studies, due to the unreliability of birth and death data at the time, deaths due to famine are usually estimated at around 30 million.

The effect of the Great Leap Forward was the discontent of most Party leaders with Mao's radical policies. The cancellation of the Great Leap was decided at the meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau held in Wuhan in December 1958. At that meeting, Mao abandoned the head of state, which passed to Liu Shaoqi, named President of the People's Republic. Mao, however, retained his position as President of the Party and, as the maximum ideological reference, was hardly the object of criticism.

One of the few leaders who dared to criticize Mao was Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, the hero of the Korean War, who, protected by his enormous influence and prestige, had no qualms about openly attacking Mao's policies. of Mao. However, these criticisms by Peng Dehuai of Mao's management, formulated in July 1959 during a meeting of Party leaders in Lushan, in Jiangxi province, motivated a furious response from Mao, who accused Peng Dehuai of opportunist and serving the interests of the Soviet Union. Peng Dehuai was removed from office and Mao, although removed from the management of the Government, once again demonstrated his total authority within the Party.

Mao's criticism of Peng Dehuai as a henchman of Soviet interests in turn highlighted the deterioration of relations between the two countries. Soviet leader Khrushchev had been critical of the Great Leap Forward and of the military operations of the People's Republic, which had bombed the islands of Matsu and Quemoy, controlled by the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan. The tension between the two great communist regimes did not stop growing and would lead to an open conflict during the 1960s.

The end of the Great Leap Forward would be one of the most difficult moments for the young People's Republic. In 1958, the Xunhua Incident broke out, resulting in a massacre. Added to the famine and growing international isolation were other conflicts in which it was involved, such as the border war with India in 1959, in which the Soviets supported India, and the armed insurrection in Tibet (1959), which He made the People's Liberation Army intervene in an action that would cause numerous deaths and the flight to India of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan spiritual leader. On the other hand, Mao launched the "Two bombs, one satellite" in 1958. With the help of the Soviet Union and numerous leading scientists who returned to mainland China from abroad (including Qian Xuesen, Deng Jiaxian and Qian Sanqiang), China's first atomic bomb, nuclear missile, hydrogen bomb and artificial satellite were successfully developed in 1970. However, the program had been seriously affected by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Faced with all these problems, the men who held the reins of state policy, especially Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, tried to revive economic growth. This was particularly true after the "Conference of 7000 Pictures" in early 1962. In 1963, Mao launched the 'Socialist Education Movement'. Mao Zedong, however, did not seem happy with the marginal role to which he had been relegated and, supported by his faithful follower Lin Biao, launched a new campaign of ideological mobilization in order to regain power: The Great Cultural Revolution Proletarian.

The Cultural Revolution

After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, it was Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping who took care of the day-to-day tasks of the Government, while Mao, removed from political power, had assumed a role as a mere ideological reference. However, Mao did not seem to have accepted his move to a symbolic position willingly, and was eager to regain political power. This desire to regain a central role in the country's government would become a reality thanks above all to the support of two groups of leaders with their own ambitions. On one side was the People's Liberation Army, which after the dismissal of Peng Dehuai had become led by the military man Lin Biao, a loyal follower of Mao. On the other hand, Mao's own wife Jiang Qing, who had been a renowned actress in her youth, exerted great influence on the cultural life of the People's Republic, and had allies in artistic and journalistic circles.

The activities of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing would be decisive in achieving Mao's return to absolute power within the framework of an intense mass campaign that received the name of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The development of this campaign has its origin in the cult of personality around the figure of Mao Zedong, fundamentally promoted by Lin Biao. Lin himself would be in charge of compiling Mao's most important speeches in a book, the Quotes from Chairman Mao, which would become a reference work and required reading for the general population and, especially, for the Army. Furthermore, in 1966, Jiang Qing's collaborators in Shanghai began a series of criticisms of Party members loyal to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. These criticisms would end up undermining their support base until forcing their departure from power.

The victory of the Maoists in this struggle for power was accompanied by intense ideological reaffirmation activity in which numerous Party leaders were accused of counter-revolutionary activities and pro-capitalist or pro-Soviet tendencies. The purges in power led to the marginalization of some three million members of the Communist Party, destroying the organizational framework of the Party and the State. Along with leaders aligned with Liu Shaoqi's line, intellectuals were also victims of the purges of the Cultural Revolution, which ostracized most writers and artists. These purges would be carried out by revolutionary committees spread throughout the country that replaced the conventional power structures of the Party, together with the red guards, organized groups of young people at the service of the Revolution who were in charge to ensure ideological orthodoxy. Precisely the Red Guards would be responsible for the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution, in the form of violent acts and campaigns to destroy numerous ancient works of art considered vestiges of feudal society prior to socialist liberation. The situation of chaos generated by the Red Guards went far beyond what the Party leaders, with Mao at the head, had anticipated and, in January 1967, he had to order the Army to stop the excesses of the Red Guards. red guards The Army's intervention allowed Lin Biao to take control of the Party and become Mao's successor.

However, Lin Biao's apparent victory would be very brief. Although the Ninth Party Congress confirmed Mao's absolute leadership and Lin's status as Lin's successor, the latter's extreme adulation provoked the suspicion of Mao, who saw in Lin's attitude a simple interest in seizing power.. Although both were publicly recognized as the victors of the Cultural Revolution, in the private sphere Mao had already withdrawn his confidence in Lin Biao, and he would go on to promote two coups d'état. After the second coup attempt was discovered, Lin Biao tried to flee to Moscow on a plane that would end up crashing while flying over Mongolia, according to the official version, about whose veracity there are still doubts (see, in the bibliography, Yao Mingle, 1983, and Uhalley and Jin, 1993).

Although the IX Congress had declared the end of the Cultural Revolution, Mao affirmed that the revolution had to be something permanent, necessary to maintain ideological purity safe from capitalist or revisionist deviations. In fact, the radicalization of Chinese political life and struggles for power would continue even after Mao's death. Thus, the disappearance of Lin Biao fueled the power ambitions of the faction headed by Jiang Qing, years later known as the Gang of Four, which occupied prominent positions in the Government and the Political Bureau. Meanwhile, the most important figure in the State apparatus was Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, who in the last years of his life would direct the rapprochement of the People's Republic of China with Western countries and, especially, with the United States.. In this way, at the beginning of the 1970s, while internal conflicts were taking place in the fight to succeed Mao, China put an end to its policy of isolation and began a period of diplomatic and economic relations with the capitalist West.

Foreign Relations

While the first decade of the People's Republic had been marked by close collaboration with the Soviet Union, the second decade was characterized by the international isolation of the Chinese communist regime, facing both the Soviet bloc and Western countries, the which, in most cases, continued to recognize the Taiwan regime as the legitimate government of China.

The deterioration of relations between the People's Republic and the Soviet Union would become much more intense after the failure of the Great Leap Forward. In 1960, the Soviet Union withdrew all its technical personnel established in China, and canceled cooperation projects between the two countries. From that moment on, the People's Republic remained even more isolated, without support in the West or even in the Soviet bloc. Albania, the small European country that had abandoned the Soviet model, became its only ally. To the ideological confrontation between the two communist regimes, territorial disputes should be added throughout the 1960s, which would lead to an armed incident on the Manchurian border in 1969, when Chinese troops launched an attack against Russian troops stationed. on the islet of Zhenbao (Damanski in Russian), in the Ussuri River, the most critical moment in relations between the two countries.

However, throughout the 1970s, there was a rapprochement between the People's Republic of China and all Western countries and Japan (establishment of formal diplomatic relations with France (1964), Italy (1970), United Kingdom United Kingdom (1972), Japan (1972), West Germany (1972) and Spain (1973). The reasons for this approach were mainly two. On the one hand, the People's Republic of China had carried out successful nuclear tests in 1964, and China's new status as a nuclear power made impossible the long-standing aspiration of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government in Taiwan to reconquer the Chinese mainland. This led Western countries that did not yet recognize the authorities in Beijing to initiate contacts to establish diplomatic relations with the communist regime. On the other hand, the intensity of the confrontation between China and the Soviet Union, which threatened to lead to an open war between the two, made Western countries stop seeing China and the Soviet Union as a single monolithic bloc. In the context of the Cold War, China had ceased to be an enemy for the West, and both shared the vision of the Soviet Union as an ideological adversary.

In addition, the People's Republic of China needed to abandon its isolationism and, faced with the Soviet bloc, improving relations with the West and even with Japan became a priority. Until his death in 1976, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai would be responsible for this new open foreign policy. This occurred at the same time as the struggles for power within the Party and the State.

Particularly complex was the negotiation between the People's Republic and the United States for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two. Already in the 1960s, the United States had assumed that, sooner or later, it would end up recognizing the Government in Beijing to the detriment of the Taiwanese authorities. In 1971, the United States lifted its veto on the admission of the People's Republic as a member of the United Nations, allowing the People's Republic to enter the organization, where it took China's seat on October 25, that year, thanks to resolution 2758, which transferred recognition as the legitimate Government of all of China to the People's Republic. Until that day, China's seat, as well as permanent member status of the Security Council, had corresponded to the Republic of China, the refugee regime in Taiwan, which was then forced to leave the organization. That same year, 1971, United States national security advisor Henry Kissinger secretly traveled to Beijing, where he met with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai to discuss American diplomatic recognition and President Richard Nixon's future visit to Beijing, an event historic that would occur two years later, in 1973. American domestic political problems, such as Watergate, and the difficulty of finding a solution that would allow the United States to maintain its privileged relations with Taiwan, would delay the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two. countries until January 1, 1979, under the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Disasters

Controversies

In the Mao era, tens of millions of people died in various political movements and in the Great Chinese Famine, while tens of millions of people were persecuted and permanently paralyzed. China became a one-party country after the Anti-Rightist Movement in 1957, in which democracy and the rule of law were damaged and at least 550,000 intellectuals and political dissidents were persecuted. Subsequently, the Cultural Revolution severely damaged the rule of law as well as traditional Chinese culture and moral values; Massacres took place throughout the country, while mass cannibalism also occurred. Higher education came to a halt during the Cultural Revolution, while scientific research was seriously affected, as many scientists were persecuted, murdered, or committed suicide. Mao and the Communist Party of China (CPC) also exported the ideology of socialism and socialist revolution to other parts of the world, especially Southeast Asia. Under the support of Mao and CCP, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide that killed 1.5-2 million people in just three years.

On the other hand, supporters of the Maoist era claim that under Mao, China's unity and sovereignty were assured for the first time in a century, and that there was development of infrastructure, industry, health, education (only 20 % of the population could read in 1949, compared to 65.5% thirty years later). Supporters also often doubt the statistics given about the number of fatalities or other damage caused by Mao's campaigns, attributing the high number of deaths from natural disasters, famine or other consequences of political chaos during Chiang Kai-shek's government.

The transition stage (1976-1978)

The death of Mao Zedong on September 9, 1976 marked the end of an era and opened an uncertain struggle for power. Two other main leaders of the Communist Party, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, also died in 1976. The transfer of power to a new generation of leaders would be accompanied by intense political and social conflicts throughout the year. The death of Zhou Enlai, which occurred in January, had provoked acts of mourning that would culminate in the popular protest of April 5, known as the Tian'anmen Incident of 1976. On the occasion of the traditional holiday of Qingming, the festival of the deceased, thousands of people had been gathering daily in Tian'anmen Square to pay tribute to the late prime minister, dedicating poems to him and laying wreaths next to the Monument to the Martyrs of the Revolution, in the center of the emblematic Beijing square. The growing number of citizens participating in these acts of mourning, which many saw as a show of support for Deng Xiaoping, would eventually lead the police to cordon off the square and remove the wreaths. The police intervention would provoke a massive protest on April 5, 1976, when about one hundred thousand people demonstrated in the square, chanting slogans in memory of Zhou and in support of Deng Xiaoping, who would be removed from power again as a result of the incident.

These protests would have been a sign of real popular support for Deng Xiaoping's faction, whom Zhou Enlai had rehabilitated and seemed to favor as his successor. However, Mao Zedong depended on the support of what years later would be known contemptuously as the Gang of Four, the faction led by his wife Jiang Qing and opposed to Deng Xiaoping, whom they had already managed to remove from power during the Revolution. Cultural. The Gang of Four, however, aroused many suspicions among the Army's top brass, and these rivalries would lead Mao to appoint a little-known Party member, Hua Guofeng, as his successor. Precisely after the April 5 incident, Hua was named prime minister and vice president of the Party, and on April 8, Party leaders organized a demonstration in Tian'anmen Square in support of Mao and Hua, in response. to the earlier protest by supporters of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.

Mao was already very ill when he appointed Hua Guofeng as his successor, to whom he left a written message, in which he urged him to carry out the job calmly and according to the principles established in the preceding years. Mao's handwritten message added a third sentence: "With you in charge, I remain calm." This phrase would be the key to the legitimacy of Hua Guofeng's rise to power. Given the impotence of the Gang of Four, Hua saw himself endorsed as Mao Zedong's successor.

After Mao's death on September 9, the absence of formal mechanisms for succession opened a power struggle between Hua Guofeng and the Gang of Four. Hua knew that Jiang Qing and the rest of the Four wanted to overthrow him and seize power. To do this, they had control of the media. However, Hua knew that the Army and broad sectors of the Party and society distrusted Jiang and his three collaborators, and launched the attack to consolidate his power. At midnight on October 6, 1976, the Four were summoned to a meeting at the headquarters of the Party's Political Bureau. The meeting was actually a trap to stop them. Wang Hongwen resisted and killed two security guards in the struggle, but was eventually subdued. After Wang, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan arrived, and they were immediately detained. Jiang Qing, for her part, was arrested in her own bedroom. In this way, on October 6, 1976, with the Four imprisoned, Hua Guofeng consolidated his power.

However, Hua's situation was quite precarious. His legitimacy was based on his status as Mao's successor, but he had regained power during the Cultural Revolution thanks to the support of, on the one hand, Lin Biao and, on the other, the Jiang Qing faction. With Lin Biao dead and Jiang Qing in prison, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping's enemies were now out of the power struggle. Liu Shaoqi had already died, but Deng Xiaoping was preparing his return to power.

Hua Guofeng's lack of charisma and the circumstantial way in which he had achieved power made it impossible for him to maintain his position in the face of harassment from Deng Xiaoping's supporters, the majority in the party and who included many regional leaders, such as Zhao Ziyang, party leader in Sichuan.

The successes derived from the economic reforms in the provinces led by Deng Xiaoping's supporters gave them the prestige necessary to tip the balance in their favor. Hua was forced to accept the rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping at the top of the Party and Army. During the celebration of the Third Plenary Session of the XI Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1978, Deng Xiaoping reinforced his power base and, two years later, during the V Plenary Session, he established himself as the new top leader of the country.

The era of Deng Xiaoping (1978-1989)

Invalidating the Cultural Revolution

After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Deng Xiaoping first proposed the idea of "Boluan Fanzheng" in September 1977. Deng led this influential program attempting to right the wrongs of the Cultural Revolution.

In December 1978, with the support of Ye Jianying and other high-ranking officials, Deng finally replaced Hua Guofeng and became the supreme leader of China during the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee. Deng Xiaoping's gradual rise to power would be completed during the IV Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Party, held between June 27 and 29, 1981. At that meeting, Hua Guofeng, who had resigned as prime minister a year earlier, he resigned from the two positions he still held, that of president of the Party, which passed to Hu Yaobang, and that of president of the Central Military Commission, the only position of power that Deng Xiaoping himself formally assumed. During that Congress, a document titled 'Resolution on various issues in the history of our Party since the founding of the People's Republic' was also published, in which an official assessment of the Cultural Revolution and the Mao figure. That document blamed Lin Biao and the Gang of Four for the Cultural Revolution, which was said to "[...] led to national chaos and was a catastrophe for the Party, the State and the whole of the town". The document attributed "serious errors" to Mao, but he considered that his merits as a revolutionary leader had been far above his mistakes. Thus, in 1981 the People's Republic of China left behind a time of internal struggles and divisions and achieved political stability under the country's new leaders. Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang and Premier Zhao Ziyang had to face the unavoidable challenge of economic reform.

As a consequence of the Cultural Revolution, public security worsened after 1976, and as a result, Deng launched an anti-crime campaign in 1983.

Chinese economic reform

The Decanal Plan that Hua Guofeng had announced in 1978 had proven unviable, betting on disproportionate growth of heavy industry without undertaking the technological progress or the entry of external capital necessary for development of that level. The imbalances in the development model were seen in the growing inflation, which in 1980, according to unofficial estimates, exceeded 15%. The abrupt interruption of the Decanal Plan, which was to last until 1986, led to the cancellation of enormous infrastructure projects that mainly affected Japanese companies and, to a lesser extent, German and American companies that had won the contracts for these projects, among them that there were steel refineries and petrochemical plants that would not be completed. The failure of such projects, which had caused a spiral of growth in the State deficit and inflation, led to a reevaluation of the modernization strategy.

Abandoning Soviet-inspired economic ideas, the country's new leaders carried out reforms in the agricultural and industrial sectors. In the first of these, the so-called 'responsibility system' was implemented, by which farmers had to commit to their cooperatives to reach a production quota. Production in excess of the quota was at the disposal of the peasants, who could sell it on the free market. This new system led to a notable growth in agricultural production in the 1980s, and increased the income levels of the rural population. In the area of industrial policy, the State paralyzed large heavy industry projects and encouraged the development of small industry. With the introduction of the "industrial responsibility system", state-owned companies acquired the possibility of managing their own profits. As in the analogous system in the agricultural field, the companies agreed to contribute a quota to the State, keeping the rest of the profits that they had, which they could reinvest in the company's own development. This quota system would be transformed on June 1, 1983 into an 'income tax' system, which broke with the tradition of Chinese communism, and consolidated economic reforms. The new development model, in which light industry had priority, largely followed the guidelines that years before had marked the economic growth of Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea.

On the other hand, on January 31, 1979, the Shenzhen Shekou Industrial Zone was founded, becoming the first experimental area in China to 'open'. Under the leadership of Yuan Geng, the "Shekou model" Development process gradually took shape, embodied in its famous slogan 'Time is Money, Efficiency is Life (时间就是金钱, 效率就是生命)', which then spread widely to other parts of China. In January 1984, Deng Xiaoping made his first inspection tour to Shenzhen and Zhuhai, praising the "Shenzhen Speed" of development, as well as the success of special economic zones. In May 1984, China opened another 14 coastal cities to foreign investment, including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tianjin.

Despite the success of these reforms, the growth rate of the Chinese economy was threatened by the sharp increase in population. While birth rates had been promoted in the Maoist era, at this time the rapid growth of the Chinese population began to be seen as a problem, which put at risk the achievements of increased agricultural production. In 1982, a census was carried out to count the population. The previous census, in 1964, had given a figure of 694.6 million inhabitants, and the 1981 census confirmed the fears of many specialists; China already exceeded one billion inhabitants. The official figure of 1,008,175,288 inhabitants in mainland China (1,031,882,511 in the estimate that included Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) urged the Chinese government to introduce the one-child policy, which prohibited couples, under penalty of economic and administrative sanctions, having more than one child, with certain exceptions for rural areas (where a second child was allowed if the first was a girl) and for ethnic minorities (to whom the law did not apply). In 1985, the Great Wall Base, the first Chinese research station in Antarctica, was established. In 1986, Deng Xiaoping approved the proposal of four leading Chinese scientists and launched the '863 Program'.

Thus, under the banner of the "Four Modernizations" advocated by Zhou Enlai, and assumed by Deng Xiaoping as the central axis of development objectives, the People's Republic of China in the 1980s achieved high levels of economic growth and political stability, while slowing the rapid growth of its population and was moving towards the recovery of its territorial integrity. Alongside these successes, economic reforms had been accompanied by greater freedom of expression and greater openness to outside influence, as seen in the rise of popular cinema and music in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and in the profound changes in the way of life in an increasingly competitive and unequal society. In this atmosphere of change, voices critical of the system began to emerge, demanding more political freedoms and expression. Among the voices most critical of the system were those of astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, a professor at Hefei University who defended the introduction of political pluralism and freedom of expression in the style of Western countries, and those of writers Liu Binyan and Wang Ruowang., who came to openly criticize the Communist Party, warning of what they called the failure of the socialist model. Added to these complaints from intellectuals were the student protests of December 1986, when massive demonstrations of students demanding political reforms took place in fifteen Chinese cities. This wave of protests claimed a major political victim: the general secretary of the Party Hu Yaobang, one of the strong men of the regime, was forced to resign in January 1987, accused of sympathizing with the protests and of having done nothing to prevent them.. Hu was forced to make a self-critical statement and was removed from power. The departure of Hu Yaobang left the position of general secretary of the Party in the hands of Zhao Ziyang, the other strong man of the regime along with Deng Xiaoping, who until then had been prime minister, a position to which Li Peng, adopted son of Zhou Enlai, took over. and considered part of the most conservative faction of the Party. Despite these changes, and an increase in information censorship in order to silence the protests, the climate of discontent, at a time of crisis in the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, continued to increase, and would lead to one of the most critical moments in the history of the communist regime: the Tian'anmen Square protests of 1989.

Political reforms

On August 18, 1980, Deng Xiaoping gave a speech titled "On the Reform of the Party and State Leadership System (党和国家领导制度改革)" At an expanded meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in Beijing, launching the political reforms in China, he called for an end to bureaucracy, centralization of power and patriarchy. At the same time, he proposed term limits for leadership positions in China and advocated for 'democratic centralism'. and "collective leadership". Furthermore, Deng proposed to the National People's Congress a systematic review of China's Constitution (the 1978 Constitution), and emphasized that the Constitution should be able to protect the civil rights of Chinese citizens and should reflect the principle of separation of powers; He also advocated for 'one man, one vote' among the leaders to avoid the dictatorship of the General Secretary of the CCP. In December 1982, the Fifth National People's Congress approved the fourth Constitution of China, known as the "Constitution of 1982", which embodies Chinese-style constitutionalism and most of its content remains in force as of today.

In the first half of 1986, Deng repeatedly called for the revival of political reforms, because the original political system hindered further economic reforms and the country had seen a growing trend of corruption and economic inequality. In September 1986 established a five-man research unit for China's political reforms; Members included Zhao Ziyang, Hu Qili, Tian Jiyun, Bo Yibo, and Peng Chong. Deng's intention to carry out political reforms was to increase administrative efficiency, further separate responsibilities between the Communist Party and the Government, and eliminate the disadvantages of bureaucracy. Although he also mentioned the rule of law and democracy, Deng delimited the reforms within the "one-party system" and opposed the implementation of Western-style constitutionalism. In October 1987, at the 13th CPC National Congress chaired by Deng, Zhao Ziyang gave a report drafted by Bao Tong on political reforms. In his speech titled "Advancing the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics (沿着有中国特色的社会主义道路前进)", Zhao argued that socialism in China was still in its primary stage and, taking Deng's speech in 1980 as guidelines outlined many detailed steps that should be taken for political reforms, including promoting the rule of law and separation of powers, imposing decentralization, and improving the electoral system. In this Congress, Zhao He was elected as General Secretary of the CCP.

However, after the 1989 Tian'anmen Square protests, many prominent reformists, including Zhao and Bao, were removed from their positions, and most political reforms (after 1986) planned ended drastically. On the other hand, many policies due to the political reforms launched by Deng in the early 1980s remained effective after 1989 (such as the new Constitution, term limits, and democratic centralism), although some of them have been revoked by Xi Jinping after 2012.

Political unrest

In 1983, the 'Campaign against spiritual pollution' was launched. A massive student demonstration took place in 1986 (八六学潮). In the first half of 1987, the "campaign against bourgeois liberalization" was carried out.

The growing tension in Chinese public life would reach its maximum level in 1989. While opinions critical of the system spread, the economy, while maintaining its growth, showed signs of overheating with an increasingly high inflation rate and the entry into crisis of numerous state companies. To these social and economic circumstances must be added the symbolism of the year 1989, the year of the snake in the Chinese calendar, and in which several important anniversaries coincided, on the 40th anniversary of the proclamation of the People's Republic and the 70th. th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, as well as the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Alluding to these events, the most famous political dissident of the moment, the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, sent a letter to Deng Xiaoping signed jointly with 90 other intellectuals in which he demanded the release of political dissidents, in particular Wei Jingsheng, who had been in prison for a long time. ten years for his defense of democracy as the "fifth modernization".

Although Deng Xiaoping rejected such requests, the international situation in which the Soviet Union's glasnost and perestroika policies were transforming Eastern European regimes threatened with spreading to China, where public criticism of the leaders was increasingly common. Everything seemed to indicate that the student protests of December 1986 could be repeated and, in fact, they were.

The trigger for the new protests, which would be much more intense and massive than those of 1986, was the death of Hu Yaobang, the former general secretary of the Party, removed from power in 1987 precisely for his attempts at dialogue with the protesters.. Hu died in Beijing on April 15 and several thousand people gathered two days later in Tian'anmen Square in the Chinese capital in tribute to his memory. The demonstrations increased in successive days and during the month of May they spread to many other Chinese cities. The publication at the end of April of a harsh editorial in the People's Daily, the organ of the Communist Party, in which the protests were described as "criminal acts", only increased support for the acts of protest. The fact that this editorial in the People's Daily was published while Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was on an official visit to North Korea seems to indicate that it was the work of the conservative sector of the Party, at a time when the Bureau itself Politico was mired in a deep division between two factions. On the one hand, Zhao Ziyang was willing to take into account the protesters' requests, while, on the other hand, Premier Li Peng defended the need to stop the protests through police intervention or even, as would eventually happen, from army. The elderly leader Deng Xiaoping seems to have wavered in supporting him, but would eventually end up supporting the sector represented by Li Peng.

The protests in the Square were closely followed by the media around the world, largely thanks to the massive dispatch of correspondents to Beijing to cover the historic visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in May 1989. This visit It meant the reconciliation of the two great powers of the socialist bloc. However, the presence of protesters in the square forced the cancellation of official events there, and Gorbachev was barely able to leave his hotel during his three-day official visit.

The humiliation that it meant for the Chinese regime not to be able to hold the events scheduled during Gorbachev's visit, while televisions around the world were broadcasting what many already considered the fall of communism in China, aroused the anger of Deng Xiaoping and of the most senior members of the Political Bureau, such as Chen Yun, Peng Zhen and Yang Shangkun. On May 17, at a meeting at the highest level, it was decided to immediately dismiss General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. On May 19, as protests spread across China, Deng traveled to Wuhan, where he chaired a meeting of the Central Military Commission. Some sources (see Hsü, 2000) claim that a plan was developed to provisionally move the capital to Wuhan in case the Government lost control over Beijing.

Reassured by the military's support following the Wuhan meeting, Deng Xiaoping ordered Li Peng to declare martial law in Beijing on May 20. Over the next few days, Deng Xiaoping, together with Li Peng and President Yang Shangkun, led the military operation to end the protests. Some 300,000 soldiers were moved to Beijing, and took up positions on the outskirts of the city.

Finally, on the night of June 3, the Army began the operation. The tanks entered the city and headed towards the Plaza. The clashes took place during the early hours of the morning on June 4. At 6 in the morning, the operation was finished and the Army proceeded to remove the bodies of the fatal victims from the streets. The bodies were taken to the Babaoshan cemetery, where they were cremated without allowing any registration or accounting of the deceased. It is not known how many people lost their lives in the incident. Estimates range from 400 to more than 3,000, depending on sources.

The violent repression of the demonstrations in Beijing put an end to the wave of protests in the country and, during the following years, would condemn the Chinese regime to international ostracism, the target of strong criticism from international public opinion. In any case, the regime had avoided the fate of the Eastern European regimes and, once political stability was recovered, the most ideologically and economically conservative sector, represented by Li Peng and Chen Yun, defended a retreat from economic reforms of the type capitalist. However, Deng Xiaoping, although he had ended up supporting the conservative sector, continued to believe in the need to maintain and, even more so, accelerate the pace of economic reforms. His distrust of conservatives appears to have been the reason why he chose as the new Party general secretary and successor a little-known politician, Jiang Zemin, the mayor of Shanghai who had achieved strong economic development in that city during the last decade., and that he had managed to maintain public order in Shanghai while protests took place in Beijing and other Chinese cities.

Military modernization

In early 1979, Deng began a month-long war with Vietnam. Additionally, China continued to support the Khmer Rouge during Deng Xiaoping's time along with the United States, Thailand, and several other countries to counter the Soviet Union's regional influence.

In March 1981, Deng Xiaoping determined that a military exercise for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was necessary. In September 1981, the North China Military Exercise took place, becoming the largest exercise conducted by the PLA since the founding of the People's Republic. More than 110,000 soldiers attended the military exercise, in addition to 1,327 tanks and vehicles. armored vehicles, 1,541 cannons, 475 aircraft and 10,606 army trucks.

In 1985, to modernize the PLA and save budget, Deng cut 1 million troops from the army (百万大裁军) and ordered further modernization.

Foreign Relations

On January 1, 1979, the People's Republic of China formally established diplomatic relations with the United States. In January 1979, Deng Xiaoping visited the United States, and it was the first official visit by a supreme leader of China to the United States. In the same year, the International Olympic Committee recognized the Chinese Olympic Committee for the People's Republic of China. Under the advice of Lee Kuan Yew, Deng Xiaoping agreed to open the country further and stop exporting communist ideologies and revolutions to other countries as Mao did, and the decision significantly improved relations between China and many countries, especially those in Southeast Asia.

The new political stability allowed China to confidently face the recovery of its territorial integrity. Aware that the lease period of the New Territories of the British colony of Hong Kong expired in 1997, China made clear to the United Kingdom its intention to assume control over the entire colony, including the island of Hong Kong and Kowloon, theoretically ceded in perpetuity to the British crown. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited Beijing in 1982, and on September 26, 1984, the two sides reached an agreement. The United Kingdom agreed to return the entire colony to China, and the Government of the People's Republic committed to respecting the territory's legal and economic system for at least 50 years ("one country, two systems"). After the agreement with the British, China demanded that Portugal return Macau under terms similar to those defined for Hong Kong. The final agreement between the Portuguese authorities and the Chinese Government established the date of December 20, 1999 for the definitive return of Macau.

In 1989, the relationship between China and the Soviet Union returned to normal for the first time since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s. Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, visited Beijing and met with Deng amid the Tiananmen Square protests.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the People's Republic of China continued to establish formal diplomatic relations with several countries such as the United Arab Emirates (1984), Qatar (1988), Saudi Arabia (1990), Singapore (1990), Israel (1992) and South Korea (1992).

Disasters

Controversies

After the Cultural Revolution, Deng started the Boluan Fanzheng program to correct Maoist wrongs, but some of his policies and opinions were controversial. Deng insisted on praising that Mao had done "7 good and 3 bad" for the Chinese people, while he attributed numerous disasters in the Cultural Revolution to Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. In addition, he declared and imposed the "Four Fundamental Principles" as the fundamental principles of the Constitution of China (1982), in order to maintain the state of "one-party system" in China for the Communist Party.

In addition, Deng's role in suppressing the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests was quite controversial. In fact, he also cracked down on the Democracy Wall movement and the Beijing Spring in early from the 1980s.

Jiang Zemin and the third generation (1989-2002)

Transition of power and "southern inspection" by Deng

In the years immediately after 1989, the People's Republic of China had to face a situation of international isolation and political uncertainty. While suffering the economic sanctions caused by the international rejection of the armed intervention in Tian'anmen Square, the leaders watched with concern the fall of the socialist bloc regimes in Europe. At the end of 1991, the Soviet Union itself was disintegrating into a multitude of new states that abandoned the ideology of communism. Even the Mongolian People's Republic, a territory once claimed as Chinese, abandoned communism and became the Mongolian Republic.

Given the events taking place in the world, the priority for the Communist Party of China was the maintenance of order and political stability. While some, led by Li Peng and Chen Yun, advocated a halt to economic reforms and a return to greater state control over the means of production, Deng Xiaoping favored the continuation of economic reforms as a way to restore growth. economic development and lay the foundation for a prosperous Chinese society under a strong and stable authority.

Confirmation that the economic reforms were irreversible came in January 1992, during the so-called "Deng Xiaoping southern inspection". In a visit that was initially silenced by the Chinese media itself, apparently due to the surprise it caused many Party leaders, who disagreed with Deng's economic ideas, the elderly leader visited the southern cities of Shenzhen and Canton, in the Pearl River Delta. This was the area that had benefited the most from economic opening, and during his visit, Deng gave speeches in which he stated that economic development, within the model of "socialism with Chinese characteristics", was the ultimate Government priority. Deng's words made it clear that the process of reforms and economic opening had to continue and intensify. A few days later, he reiterated these ideas in Shanghai. The model of special economic zones, with tax regimes different from the rest of the country and in which foreign investment was favored, which had been applied in a few southern cities, such as Shenzhen, was extended to new cities along the entire coast of China, and to the Pudong area of Shanghai. Deng would recognize as one of his biggest mistakes not having converted Shanghai into a special economic zone many years earlier.

Internal Affairs

In October of that year, the XIV National Congress of the Communist Party of China was held, in which the general secretary Jiang Zemin was supported as Deng's successor and advocated the deepening of the economic reforms and the construction of a "socialist market economy". The fact that China clearly opted for capitalist-style economic reforms and the opening of its markets to foreign capital investment, while economic sanctions began to be relaxed, led to a spectacular increase in foreign investments and growth unprecedented economic crisis, especially in the southeastern coastal areas. In 1992, the country's gross domestic product grew by 12%, in 1993 by 14%, and in 1994 again by 12%. Since 1992, the management of the economy was under the responsibility of Zhu Rongji, a politician considered part of the Shanghai faction, like Jiang Zemin, and who years later would succeed Li Peng as prime minister. In 1993, Jiang assumed the positions of president of the People's Republic and president of the Central Military Commission, thereby consolidating his rise to power as successor to Deng, who, now very old and having difficulty expressing himself, thus left the reins of the country to the new generation of reformist leaders to the detriment of the conservative sector of the Party. In addition, the "Three Gorges Dam" It started in 1994.

After the death of Deng Xiaoping and the recovery of sovereignty over Hong Kong, the Chinese economy continued its dizzying growth. Doubts that this growth, threatened by problems such as the rising rate of inflation and the lack of competitiveness of many public companies, could be maintained, were compounded by the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Although the crisis began in Southeast Asia, its The effects soon affected South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong and rumors spread about the inevitable depreciation of the Chinese currency, the renminbi. However, contrary to the forecasts of the foreign economic press, the solidity of Chinese economic growth, supported by the policies designed by Zhu Rongji, allowed China to avoid the depreciation of its currency and emerge much stronger from the financial crisis that devastated the country. rest of East Asia.

On the ideological level, Jiang Zemin enunciated his theory of Triple Representativeness, according to which the Party should represent the "advanced productive forces", the "advanced culture of China" and to "the interests of the majority of the people". The importance of this theory, which has been promoted as part of the Party's ideological heritage, along with the thoughts of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, lies in the fact that, for the first time, the Communist Party abandons the idea of class struggle, according to which it would represent the class of peasants and workers, and simply represents the economic interests and progress of the country. This is the most common interpretation and the justification for why the Communist Party, starting from the time of Jiang Zemin, has accepted among its members representatives of the business class, such as many Hong Kong businessmen who currently hold positions. at the match. In this way, in the last years of the 20th century, the Chinese political system completed a transition that began in the time of Deng Xiaoping, moving from a Soviet-inspired model to a model of political authoritarianism combined with economic capitalism similar to that applied in Asian countries. like Singapore or Malaysia.

In the 1990s, Project 211 and Project 985 were launched for higher education in China. In 2002, the Chinese national football team, led by head coach Bora Milutinović, entered the FIFA World Cup Final Tournament for the first time in history.

Foreign Relations

A victim of Parkinson's disease and his advanced age, Deng Xiaoping died in Beijing on February 19, 1997, just a few months before one of his great dreams came true, the restoration of Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong.. On July 1, 1997, as agreed many years before by Deng Xiaoping with Margaret Thatcher, the British flag was permanently lowered in Hong Kong, which became a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China. Two years later, on December 20, 1999, Macau, after more than four centuries of Portuguese presence, became the second special administrative region.

In both Hong Kong and Macau, the administration model known as 'one country, two systems' would be applied, a motto coined by Deng Xiaoping himself which designated the coexistence of two different economic systems., socialism with Chinese characteristics of mainland China and capitalism inherited by Europeans in Hong Kong and Macau. The stated goal of this system was to also offer it to Taiwan as an attractive option for the island's citizens for national reunification. Despite contacts during the 1990s, Taiwan, the so-called "rebel province", remained under the sovereignty of the Republic of China, in a political separation that had lasted fifty years, and that has continued to this day.

In November 1991, China joined the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the same year, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was established In August 2002, due to the efforts of renowned mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern, the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians was held in Beijing, the first time in a developing country, with Chern as honorary president and Wu Wenjun as president of the congress.

Disasters

Controversies

In 1999, the Chinese government headed by Jiang Zemin decided to suppress Falun Gong and persecute Falun Gong practitioners.

Hu Jintao and the fourth generation (2002-2012)

Transition of power

At the beginning of the XXI century, the generational change in the power leadership of the People's Republic of China was confirmed. Between 2002 and 2004, Jiang Zemin was replaced in all his positions by his successor Hu Jintao. Hu, like Premier Wen Jiabao, belongs to the fourth generation of Chinese communist leaders.

Internal Affairs

During his time, Hu Jintao proposed his ideology of "Scientific Development" and "Harmonious Society." Under his leadership, the Chinese economy continued its expansion. The gross domestic product, excluding Hong Kong and Macau, has surpassed that of economic powers such as Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. During March 2006, it was announced that the People's Republic's foreign exchange reserves, even discounting Hong Kong and Macau, had now become the largest in the world ahead of those of Japan. Additionally, in late 2002, the "South-North Water Transfer Project" began to be built.

In April 2012, the expulsion of conservative Bo Xilai, "one of the most influential and charismatic leaders in China," from the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party due to his wife's alleged involvement in the murder of a British businessman (whom he supposedly asked for help to withdraw a large sum from China) causes the "worst political crisis the country has experienced since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 as his fall' 34;has facilitated the path for the reformists, who are fighting with the conservative wing for seats in the highest organs of power that will be renewed at the 18th Congress of the CCP at the end of the year.

During Hu's time, there were a series of scientific and academic achievements in China. Some were direct results of the "863 Program" from the time of Deng Xiaoping. In 2003, China successfully sent an astronaut, Yang Liwei, into space via Shenzhou 5, becoming the third country in the world to do so independently after the United States and the Soviet Union.. In 2010, 'Jiaolong', the Chinese manned deep-sea research submersible, was deployed. In 2011-12, BeiDou-2, the Chinese navigation satellite system, became operational. In 2011, Tiangong-1, China's first prototype space station, was successfully sent into space. In October 2012, Mo Yan became the first Chinese citizen (mainland China) to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In March 2012, the results of the "Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment" in Shenzhen they received international attention.

Foreign Relations

Internationally, China's position in the War on Terrorism brought the country diplomatically closer to the United States. In addition, the country hosted events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 Asian Games, and in 2011, the Summer Universiade in Shenzhen. Additionally, in 2010, the World Expo took place in Shanghai.

Disasters

Controversies

In Hu Jintao's time, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government created the "50 Cent Party", attempting to "guide" online public opinions in favor of the Communist Party and the Chinese government.

In this generation, Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo was arrested and sentenced to prison for 11 years. Liu, along with others, authored Charter 08 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

Xi Jinping and the fifth generation (since 2012)

Transition of power

Xi Jinping became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and the chairman of the Central Military Commission on November 15, 2012. And on March 14, 2013, he became the seventh President of the People's Republic of China. Li Keqiang became the prime minister of China in March 2013.

Internal Affairs

A massive long-term anti-corruption campaign has been carried out under Xi since 2012. However, many of the affected officials were Xi's political rivals, including Zhou Yongkang, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong.

In March 2018, the National People's Congress, controlled by the Communist Party, approved a set of constitutional amendments that include the elimination of term limits for the president and vice president.

Moreover, in 2013, the Yutu rover was successfully deployed to the moon after the Chang'e 3 lander landed on the moon. In 2015, Tu Youyou became the first citizen Chinese (Mainland China) to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In December 2015, Dark Matter Particle Explorer, China's first space observatory, was successfully launched. In 2016, the Tiangong-2 space laboratory was successfully launched. In 2016, the "Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST)" was built; in Guizhou.

In 2018, the Hong Kong – Zhuhai – Macau Bridge, the longest sea crossing bridge in the world, was open to the public.

Foreign Relations

As Xi continued to consolidate power domestically, he gradually abandoned the diplomatic principles ('hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead') established by Deng Xiaoping and appeared more as a "strong man" on the global stage. Xi proposed the Belt and Road Initiative, which received widespread attention from around the world (both reception and criticism).

In 2014, the 22nd annual APEC leaders' meeting was held in Beijing. In 2016, the G20 Summit was held in Hangzhou. In 2017, the Ninth BRICS Summit was held in Xiamen. For 2017, after the tension in the region due to the tests carried out by North Korea, in October the Chinese Ministry of Commerce decreed the closure of all North Korean companies in the country.

In 2018, the Trade War between China and the United States began. In May 2020, "skirmishes between China and India" along the border and caused casualties.

Disasters

Controversies

Since 2012, Xi has withdrawn several policies from the era of Deng Xiaoping (Boluan Fanzheng) and promoted his personality cult like Mao Zedong did, raising concerns of a new Cultural Revolution. On the other hand On the other hand, the Chinese government's manipulation of economic data, such as inflating GDP figures over the years, is also a major concern.

The violation of human rights has worsened. In July 2015, hundreds of Chinese lawyers and human rights activists across the country were detained or arrested during the 709 crackdown. Mass protests in Hong Kong, as well as the Xinjiang Re-education Camps, in which detainees to more than one million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, received widespread attention and media coverage around the world. The Hong Kong National Security Law, published on June 30, 2020, received widespread attention and generated considerable concern around the world.

After Xi came to power, the Communist Party along with the Chinese government has significantly strengthened its internet censorship and tightened its control over the Chinese internet environment, blocking access to many foreign websites and mobile applications that They use the "Great Firewall". At the same time, a large number of members of the "50 Cent Party" to "guide" online narratives around the world in favor of the Party and the Government. The surveillance system and the "Chinese Social Credit System" They monitor the entire population in China.

In 2019-2020, the handling of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in China and its relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO) were quite controversial. There have been a large number of conspiracy theories and misinformation related to COVID-19, including the origin of the virus.