Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [89]
From 221 BC to AD 1911, China was ruled by twenty-four successive imperial family dynasties. Peasants, the poor people of the countryside who worked for the landowners, made up 90 percent of China’s population, and each of the dynasties was eventually overthrown by peasant rebellions. Throughout this time there were also civil wars and foreign invasions.
In 1911, after the fall of the last dynasty, the Manchu, the Chinese Republic was founded by the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen. In 1921, the Chinese Communist Party was founded. An early member was young Mao Zedong, son of a peasant. In 1927, two years after Sun Yat-sen died, General Chiang Kaishek, who was opposed to the Communist Party, became the head of the Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) government, supported by the more prosperous sections of Chinese society.
Japan invaded northern China in 1931, occupied Manchuria, and gradually forced the nationalist army into the interior. An army of communist partisans also resisted the Japanese invasion, but the two Chinese armies were opposed to each other. In 1934, the communists, pursued by the nationalists, were forced from their base in South China to the North, traveling 7,500 miles across the mountains. This epic journey is known as “The Long March.” Almost 100,000 communists set out on The Long March: thousands perished along the way, and less than 8,000 reached their destination. In 1935, Mao Zedong, hero of The Long March, became leader of the Communist Party.
When World War II broke out in 1939, the Allied powers forced the nationalists and the communists to fight together against the Japanese. This situation lasted until 1945, when Japan surrendered to the Allies. Civil war broke out again between the two Chinese armies and continued until 1949, when Chiang Kaishek’s defeated nationalists finally sought refuge on the island of Taiwan. The victorious Chairman Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Beijing on October 1, 1949.
Then Mao announced the strategy of the Great Leap Forward. He founded People’s Communes, based on communist Russia’s soviet policies. Throughout China this strategy, which lasted a decade, led to chaos, economic disaster, and famine. In addition, any form of religion was abolished under communist rule. For a short time Mao fell from power, but soon regained it. In 1966, he proclaimed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. His new message was spread across the land by his Red Guards, who killed or imprisoned numerous scholars and artists, and destroyed ancient buildings, artifacts, and gardens. The Cultural Revolution lasted until 1976. Chairman Mao’s communist philosophy was set out in the Little Red Book, which every schoolchild had to read. Then Madame Mao, a former actor, was placed in charge of a new program of theater and ballet, with the aim of using these arts as propaganda for her husband’s communist philosophy.
American president Richard Nixon made a successful inaugural visit to Beijing in 1972, four years before the death of Chairman Mao. After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping gradually led China to a more liberal way of life, with family-based farming and limited private enterprise. In 1980, China took her place in a number of international organizations. The new leaders of communist China always feared counterrevolutionary action, and in 1989 the Western world was horrified by the massacre of students