The proclamation of the People’s Republic of China
ON 1 OCTOBER 1949, 70 years ago, Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist party, stood in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace at the heart of Beijing and announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Earlier, he had declared: “The Chinese people have stood up.” Mao set China on the path to its status today as a global economic and political giant – but not without several near-fatal turns along the way.
For more than three decades beforehand, the country had been constantly at war. In the 1920s, Chinese military leaders fought each other for control. In 1937, China was attacked by Japan, plunging it into a conflict that would kill more than 10 million people and end only with the Americans dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Then, for four years, Mao Zedong’s Communists fought a civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists for control of the country. Finally, Chiang was defeated and fled to the island of Taiwan. Mao arrived in Beijing, the capital of the new state, and made his historic proclamation.
Seven decades on, the state that he founded is still there. That proclamation deserves to be remembered for reasons positive and negative. When Mao declared that the Chinese people had “stood up”, he signalled the end of the period when foreign countries could use their power to seize Chinese territory or force it to give special privileges to westerners and Japanese. China had finally become fully sovereign under Chiang Kai-shek in 1943, but it was under Mao that the new state was able to act as a beacon for other countries that were still fighting for freedom. India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam were just some of the nations that gained
Asian countries independence in the decades after the war, and they all looked to Mao’s China as an looked to Mao’s China exemplar. Regardless of your opinion of
as an exemplar Mao, it is worth remembering how rare it was in the post-Second World War period to have an Asian society choosing its own destiny.
Yet his regime also became Mao Zedong a byword for immense cruelty. declares the Mao’s disastrous economic founding of the experiment, the Great Leap People’s Republic Forward, led to the death by of China in 1949 starvation of more than 20 million people. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s killed fewer but left China’s society wrecked. Even today, in the China that brings together authoritarian politics, consumerism and high technology, it is worth remembering the rage – and hope – kindled when Mao declared his revolutionary state in 1949.