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1912: The republic founded but did not restore order or sovereignty to China, but effectively collapsed within a dew years, as dozen of Chinese regional warlords ruling with personal armies for control of territory.
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1920s: The National Party and army had emerged as the most prominent political and military force in the country.
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1924-1927: The Nationalists allied with the communists in a battle to eliminate regional warlords and to unify China.
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1927: The Nationalists broke their alliance with the communists in a violent massacre that reduced the Communist Party from nearly 58,000 to 10,000 members. The break inaugurated a civil war. In the end, the Nationalist were forced to retreat to the island of Taiwan in 1949. The intellectual revolutionaries who founded the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 were unlikely contenders for power. The rise and eventual victory of the communists owe much to historic oppotunities in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Mid 1930s-1940s: Mao Zedong emerged as leader of the communists, consolidating his leadership in the early 1940s.
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Picture URL1937: Japanese invasion of central China. Beyond territory in the northeast that the Japanese has occupied since 1931. Mao seized the strategic initiative to call for a truce in the civil war so that chinese could unite to resist Japanese aggression.
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Picture URL1937-1945: The communists grew in force from 40,000 to more than a million. Japanese defeat in WWII ended the alliances between Nationalists and communists. A new civil war began. Four years later the communists won victory, as peasant revolutionaries and Chinese nationalists.
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"Lean to One Side" 1950s: Communist leaders were sufficiently confident about the results of political education and regime accomplishments to invite nonparty intellectuals to voice criticism in the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1957. When criticism was harsh, revealing weak support for the communist system, the leaders quickly reversed themselves. They launched an Anti-Rightist Campaign which discovered more “poisonous weeds” than “blooming flowers.”
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"Lean to One Side" 1950s: Yet, “enemies of the people” were not speared: one million to three million landlords and “counterrevolutionaries” were persecuted to death in the early 1950s alone.
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Picture URL"Lean to One Side" Once the Chinese Communists were in power, they looked to the Soviet Union for a plan to build socialism. The concluded a treaty of friendship and alliance. They nationalized private industry as well. (The “lean to one side” period did feature some Maoist strategies, especailly in political participation and socialization. The Chinese implemented many policies by mobilizing the masses in intensive campaigns, with essentially compulsory participation.)
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"Lean to One Side" 1956: Frictions in relations with the Soviet Union began to develop. Tensions increased through out the 1950s, resulting in the withdrawal of aid and advisors and a Sino-Soviet split that shocked the world in 1960. Major irritants included Soviet unwillingness to aid China’s nuclear development and relaxation of Soviet hostility toward the U.S.
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1958: Dislocation associated with forming the communes and peasant mobilization to help meet high steel output targets by making steel primitive furnaces was so great that the autumn harvest was not all gathered. That year too, a false belief in excess production led to reduction in areas sown in grain. Peasant contributions to agricultural labor were decreasing due to physical exhaustion, weak material rewards, and the abolition to private plots.
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Picture URL"Geat Leap Forward" 1958: Mao proposed a strategy of simultaneous development of industry and agricultural to be achieved in two ways: (1) the labor-intensive mass mobilization of peasents to increase agricultural output by building irrigation facilities, and (2) the organization of primitive production process to give inputs to agriculture (such as small chemical fetilizer plants and primitive steel furnaces to make tools) without taking resources from industry.
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Picture URL1958: The people’s communes were born, grouping together thousands of households in one unit of economic and political organizations managed by Communist Party officials. The Maoist model was not simply an economic development strategy. It was fundamentally a political campaign, a point exemplified in the main slogan of the Great Leap Forward: “politics in command.” In Mao’s view, Chinese peasants had demonstrated tremendous enthusiasm and were ready to leap into communism, if properly m
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"Great Leap Forward" 1959: When top Chinese leader met to consider these problems, the Minister of National Defense criticized radicalism in policy implementation. In response, Mao accused the minister of factionalism, turned the meeting into a referendum on his leadership and challenged others to dare attack his Leap’s radical principles.
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Picture URL"Great Leap Forward" 1959: Moreover, just as the 1957 antirightist campaign had silenced opposition outside the party, Mao’s 1959 accusations and threats effectively silenced opposition in top echelons of party leadership. That same year, large parts of China suffered from severe drought, others from severe flooding, in one of the worst natural disasters experiences in decades.
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Picture URL"Retreat from the Leap" 1959-1960s: The famine cost an estimated 27 million lives. China retreated from Maoist radicalism but Mao continued his position as Communist Party Chairman.
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"Retreat from the Leap" Early 1960s: The communes ceased to be relevant to the agricultural production. Instead, peasant households contracted with the state for production, selling the surplus in newly established free markets. In industry, there was a renewed reliance on material incentives, technical expertise and profitability as the standard to judge performance.
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"Cultural Revolution" Mid 1960s: Mao had further developed his radical critique of the Soviet model and extended it to the Chinese experience.
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Picturce URL1966: Mao argued that many communist leaders (notably Chin’s head of state Lui Shaoqi, but also others, including Deng Xiaoping) were corrupt “capitalist roaders” who opposed socialism and must be thrown out of power. He launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, yet another exercise in radical excess. The Cultural Revolution was simultaneously a power struggle, an ideological battle, and a mass campaign to transform culture.
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"Cultural Revolution" 1967: The country was near anarchy. The schools had been shut down; most party and government offices no longer functioned; transportation and communications were severely disrupted; factional struggles were increasingly violent contests, some of them armed confrontations. Having unleashed a social conflict, Mao had been able to manipulate- but not control it. Mao called on the army to restore order that began in 1969.
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"Cultural Revolution" 1970s: Radical leaders (including Mao’s wife) had risen to power in the Cultural Revolution and supported a continuation of radical policies. Other leaders, reinstated by Mao to balance the power of the radicals, supported policies of economic modernization.
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"Cultural Revolution" 1976:The conflict was ongoing at the time of his death in 1976. Within two years the economic modernizers had won. China embarked on a new course of reform, different from anything in the experience of any communist system.
