Overview and History 23Chiang Kai-shek and his followers (along with numerous
crates of national treasures) quickly fled to the island of
Taiwan. From high above Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong
formally established the People’s Republic of China on
1 October 1949.
The People’s Republic of China
As Chairman of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong was
finally in a position to make his version of Marxism—
eventually enshrined as the ‘Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong
Thought’—the guiding philosophy behind the party and the
country’s new government.
Creating striking similarities to the dynastic systems that
came before him, Mao built a system of bureaucracy able to
efficiently and tightly control and lead society at all levels.
Essentially, the Party set policy, which was implemented by
government officials from the central down to the village
township level, all of whom were also members of the CCP.
The end result was a government operating as an organ of
the Party.
Aside from a brief interlude in 1950, when China intervened
in the Korean War to save the North Koreans from being wiped
off the map, Mao’s focus was on furthering the reforms begun
by the Communist Party during its years of wielding power
from amongst the farmers in China’s vast countryside.
These reforms were accelerated with propaganda never
seen before—in 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward.
China was to achieve a massive increase in crop production
in lightening speed through the immediate collectivisation
of China’s farmlands. Collectivisation would in turn free up
oodles of labour that then could be put to work producing
steel, thereby building China’s industrial might virtually
overnight. The reality was quite different from the vision. In
the three years that the policies of the Great Leap Forward
were implemented, 30 million people are estimated to have
starved to death in what many consider to be the greatest
man-made famine in history.
China slowly began to recover from the devastation
wrought by the Great Leap Forward, though with little help