LibGuides: Authoritarian and Single Party States: Mao: Consolidating Power

Mao Zedong Thought

Mao Thought
The importance of Mao's Works reached its zenith during the Cultural Revolution, when each household had to have a "Precious Book Table".
Educational Doctrine of Mao
Following the founding of the New China, Mao Zedong not only produced a prompt definition of a policy to establish and develop mass education.
Chairman Mao on Mao Zedong Thought
On December 25, 1979, the leading Chinese newspapers carried an article “Introducing Several of Comrade Mao Zedong’s Manuscripts on the Question of Theoretical Study”. This is that article.

Great Leap Forward

China's Great Leap Forward
Article from Education About Asia

The Great Leap Forward 1958-60
. In 1958 the CCP launched the Great Leap Forward campaign, aimed at accomplishing the economic and technical development of the country at a vastly faster pace and with greater results.
Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Cenral Planning Disaster
JSTOR
Mao's Great Leap to Famine
Op-Ed by Frank Dikötter, a well-reknowned historian
Did Mao Really Kill Millions During the Great Leap Forward?
From the Monthly Review (a socialist magazine)
Mao's Strategy of Land Reform
JSTOR article
Land Reform and Collectivization
Nationwide agicultural reforms took place from 1950 until the spring of 1953.
War of Liberation and CCP Consolidation
The CCP embarked on a program of regime consolidation, simultaneously using paternalist policies towards those that the CCP deemed to be within the ‘revolutionary fold’, and terror against those deemed as opponents of the revolution.
Chinese Economy, 1949-78
The Chinese economy during the first three decades of rule by the Chinese Communist Party was organized in a fundamentally different way from that of market economies in much of the rest of the world .

Economy of China from 1948-69
Rogel Center for Chinese Studies

Cultural Revolution

Red Guard, Destroy the Old!
1966 Articles from the Peking Review
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
Another article from the Peking Review
Mao's Cultural Revolution: The Struggle to Consolidate Power
JSTOR Article
The Guardian: All You Need to Know about China's Political Convulsion
Fifty years ago one of the bloodiest eras in Chinese history began, in which as many as two million people died. But who started it and what was it for?

Mao and the Red Guards in 1968
In the very early hours of July 28, 1968, some of the most famous figures of the subjective turbulence that in the two previous years had invested the fundamental conditions of politics in China—the Red Guards and the Maoist leaders—met in a long and dramatic face-to-face meeting,

Perspectives of Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution
One facet of the Cultural Revolution that has proved particularly controversial is the role of the Red Guard movement in the shaping of
political events.
Explaining the Red Guard Movement During the Cultural Revolution
In his “16 Points,” Mao called on the masses and youth of China to rise up and “strike at
the handful of ultra-reactionary bourgeois Rightists and counter-revolutionary revisionists
Gang of Four
The ‘Gang of Four’ was a radical faction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Its members were aligned with Mao Zedong and conducted press and propaganda campaigns on his behalf.
Gang of Four
The Gang of Four controlled four areas; intellectual education, basic theories in science and technology, teacher-student relations and school discipline, and party policies regarding intellectuals.
PODCAST: The Cultural Revolution 50 years later
Melinda Liu, longtime China Bureau Chief of Newsweek shares stories about her brother, who remained in China after the civil war and experienced it firsthand

Reforms

Agrarian Reforms
The Agrarian Reform Law, one of the communist republic’s first major policies, was passed in June 1950. It promised to seize land from affluent landlords and redistribute it to landless peasants. Its first article promised that:
Land Reform and Collectivization
Chinese Posters .net
Mao's Strategy of Land Reform
JSTOR article

Click on the image for more information

Big Character Posters

Big Character posters are a type of political writing, posted in a public place; a wall covered with such posters established a forum for discussion and dissemination. Big-character-posters played a role in the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1956, during which individuals were encouraged to express their opinions on contemporary politics.

Pictorial Posters

During every phase of the Cultural Revolution, pictorial posters played a crucial role in communicating the frequent changes of official policy and its interpretation, which are stated in the titles and slogans on the posters.

Freedom of Marriage, happiness and good luck (1053

The New Marriage Law that was promulgated on 1 May 1950 gave women legal equality with men. In a sense, the law formed the logical conclusion of the struggle that had started during the May Fourth Movement (1919) to bring to an end the influences of the patriarchy and ageism that existed in the feudal family system

Great Leap Forward

What was the Cultural Revolution?

Changing Status of Women

Women and Mao

Mao on Women
Statements from the Little Red Book and on the suicide of Miss Chao
Women in Communist China Under Mao Zedong:
Mao envisaged “women’s equality” as a dynamic force with an indelible power to help build a Chinese Communist State.
How Did Women Fare in China's Communist Revolution?
NYTimes opinion piece by a social policy analyst
The Emancipation of Chinese Women
JSTOR: article exploring Chinese policies towards women from 1950-1973

Women and Class Analysis in the Chinese Land Revolution
n the course of putting into
effect their program of land reform, three distinct approaches to the distribution of land to women were taken, each with a discernible theoretical basis, each with different implications and contradictions.

The Changes of Mao Zedong Thought on Women's Liberation
The quality of the English isn't great, but some good analysis of how Mao changed women's roles in China.
Half the Sky, or Half a Lie? Unfulfilled Promises to Women in Revolutionary China
This paper explains how feminism was used
as a tool to mobilize women in the early 1900s, but was sometimes abandoned to focus on other socialist priorities.
Women in China: Mao v. Confucius
JSTOR article from 1973.
New Marriage Law, 1950
Collection of posters and explanation of changes brought about by the law.