China Has Stood Up: Building the Party-State, 1949–1956

Part I: Taking Power (Review Question 1)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 473–475. Reading-guide sentence (p. 473): "Rather than a..."

The state on paper and in fact

Slide e introduces Mao's formula of June 1949, the "people's democratic dictatorship": democracy for "the people" (workers, peasants, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie) and dictatorship over everyone else. The point for students is that the definition of "the people" was the party's to change, and it changed often. Slide f draws the structure Ebrey describes: congresses and ministries on one side, the party's hierarchy alongside them, with the party holding the decisions. Frederick Teiwes's chapter in The Politics of China remains the clearest account of how the leadership worked in these years, and of the relative unity of the top leaders before 1957.¹ The slide's names box lists Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Chen Yun as the top five; Ebrey calls this group the "Standing Committee," but the Politburo Standing Committee was formally created only at the Eighth Congress in 1956, when Deng Xiaoping joined the top rank. In 1949 the top five sat as the Central Secretariat. The slide and notes are written to fit both facts.

The cities and the economy

Slide g joins two stories. The night of 21 November 1949, when about 2,400 police and cadres closed all 224 brothels in Beijing, gives students a vivid image of a state that could act at once; Gail Hershatter's Dangerous Pleasures shows that Shanghai moved more slowly and with more mixed motives.² The taming of inflation within about a year, through control of banks, the supply of key goods and wages paid in commodity units, is the economic half of the slide. Slide h follows Mao to Moscow for nine weeks in the winter of 1949–1950 and the Sino-Soviet Treaty of February 1950; Odd Arne Westad's Restless Empire is good on how uneven the bargain was.³ Slides i and j cover the Five-Antis campaign of 1952, which broke the independence of private business without nationalizing it at once, and the First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957), with its Soviet-built heavy industry. The truck photograph on slide j shows the first trucks from the First Automobile Works in Changchun in 1956.

Part II: War in Korea (Review Question 3)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 475–476. Reading-guide sentence (p. 476): "This war gave..."

Slide n follows Chen Jian's account of the decision to intervene: Stalin approved Kim Il-sung's plan, Mao pressed a reluctant Politburo, and the "volunteers" crossed the Yalu in October 1950.⁴ The recap link returns students to the war of 1894, when Korea was also the buffer. Slide o explains the two-year stalemate and the deadlock over prisoners. Of about 21,000 Chinese prisoners, over 14,000 went to Taiwan rather than home; David Cheng Chang's The Hijacked War shows how the camps were fought over by pro-Nationalist and pro-Communist prisoners, and how "voluntary repatriation" was shaped by coercion on both sides.⁵

Slide p sets the war's legitimacy at home against its costs. Ebrey's figure of 360,000 casualties is close to Chinese official counts; Western and some Chinese estimates run much higher, and the slide says so without giving a number. Slide q turns to the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries, the expulsion of missionaries and the takeover of Christian colleges such as Yenching. Here the deck corrects Ebrey (see the last section): the party's own final report counted about 712,000 executions.⁶

Part III: The Village Remade (Review Question 4)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 476–477. Reading-guide sentence (p. 477): "Rural cadres became..."

Land reform

Slides u and v follow Ebrey's description of the work-team method and the five class labels. Brian DeMare's Land Wars is the best recent account of how land reform was staged, with its "speak bitterness" meetings and their scripts.⁷ Ebrey says only that "a not insignificant number were executed." The notes give students the scholarly range: Teiwes and most historians put deaths in land reform at between one and two million; Frank Dikötter's estimate of 1.5 to 2 million sits at the top of that range. Slide v deliberately has no image, since the surviving photographs of struggle meetings show violence against identifiable people. The "caste-like" inheritance of labels, which lasted until 1979, is the best bridge to the Cultural Revolution in Lecture 3.

Collectives, grain and cadres

Slide w puts the three stages on a timeline. Ebrey dates cooperatives in the south to 1950–1953 and higher-level collectives to 1954–1956; the high tide came in the second half of 1955 and the winter of 1955–1956, after Mao's speech of July 1955 sped the process. The Wugong cooperative of Geng Changsuo, in the slide's photograph, is the village studied by Friedman, Pickowicz and Selden.⁸ Slide x builds a diagram of the 1953 unified purchase and sale of grain from Ebrey's account, rather than showing ration coupons, which are mostly text. Slide y holds the Reading Guide anchor and puts a face on the new cadres with Shen Jilan of Xigou, Shanxi, who won equal pay for women's labor in 1951 and sat in the National People's Congress from 1954; Gail Hershatter's The Gender of Memory is the essential book on village women in these years.⁹ Slide z lists the gains. Ebrey mentions barefoot doctors in the same paragraph as the 1950s schools; the program dates from Mao's directive of June 1965 and spread from 1968, so the slide places it "from the late 1960s."¹⁰

The monument

Slide cc closes the main lecture with the Monument to the People's Heroes (Ebrey's Material Culture feature, p. 475), designed by teams including Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin and unveiled in 1958. The relief shown is the panel of the anti-Japanese guerrilla war; the first panel, the destruction of opium at Humen, links back to the Opium War lecture.

Pierian Spring: Society and the Borderlands (Review Questions 2 and 5)

Textbook anchors: Ebrey, p. 474 (Q2: "The Communist Party..."); p. 477 (Q5: "Despite the protections...").

Slide ff treats the danwei through Lü and Perry's collection; hukou is left for Lecture 2, where Review Question 8 asks about it.¹¹ Slide gg treats the Marriage Law of 1950, with links back to the New Culture attack on arranged marriage and to the Nationalist Civil Code. Neil Diamant's archival study shows that rural and poorer women used the law more boldly than the party expected, and that local cadres often obstructed them; instructors may want to add that the campaign was accompanied by many deaths of women in marriage disputes, which the deck does not quantify.¹² Slide hh retells Ebrey's biography of Jin Shuyu from Chinese Lives.¹³ No photograph of either scene exists, so both slides use an AI-generated illustration (approved 2026-10-27), captioned on the slide and listed on the sources slide as an interpretation, not a historical source.

Slides kk through mm follow the nationalities project. Thomas Mullaney's Coming to Terms with the Nation explains how over four hundred self-reported group names from the 1953–1954 census were reduced by classification teams, most famously in Yunnan; the fifty-fifth group, the Jino, was recognized only in 1979.¹⁴ Slide ll lists the five autonomous regions and their dates, and uses James Millward for Xinjiang, including the Production and Construction Corps of 1954 and the rise in the Han share of the population from about 6 percent in 1949 to about 40 percent by the late 1970s.¹⁵ Slide mm follows Tsering Shakya for Tibet: the battle of Chamdo in October 1950, the 17-Point Agreement of 23 May 1951, and the Lhasa uprising of March 1959, after which the Dalai Lama reached India.¹⁶

Corrections and Sources Behind the Slide Notes

The student notes in this deck are written entirely for students and do not flag disagreements with the textbook. The slides teach the corrected history; this list records each correction, the page, the slide, and the source.

Notes

1. Frederick C. Teiwes, "The Establishment and Consolidation of the New Regime, 1949–1957," in The Politics of China: Sixty Years of the People's Republic of China, ed. Roderick MacFarquhar, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6–86. ↩

2. Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). ↩

3. Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012). ↩

4. Chen Jian, China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). ↩

5. David Cheng Chang, The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). The figures behind the deck: about 21,400 Chinese prisoners in UN custody at the armistice, of whom 14,342 went to Taiwan and about 7,100 returned to China. ↩

6. Yang Kuisong, "Reconsidering the Campaign to Suppress the Counterrevolutionaries," The China Quarterly 193 (2008): 102–121. ↩

7. Brian DeMare, Land Wars: The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019). ↩

8. Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). ↩

9. Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). ↩

10. Xiaoping Fang, Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012). ↩

11. Xiaobo Lü and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997). ↩

12. Neil J. Diamant, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). ↩

13. Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye, Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China (New York: Pantheon, 1987). ↩

14. Thomas S. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). ↩

15. James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). ↩

16. Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Frederick C. Teiwes, in The Politics of China, ed. MacFarquhar (2011). The leadership and the consolidation of power, 1949–1957.

Chen Jian, China's Road to the Korean War (1994). Why Mao intervened.

David Cheng Chang, The Hijacked War (2020). The prisoners and the armistice.

Brian DeMare, Land Wars (2019). Land reform as revolutionary theater.

Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (1991). One Hebei village through collectivization.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory (2011). Village women remember the collective years.

Thomas S. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation (2011). How the fifty-five nationalities were made.

Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows (1999). Tibet since 1947.