People's Republic of China Formed - Oct. 1, 1949

Mao Zedong proclaimed the formation of the People's Republic of China on this day in 1949. There's more in the Stuff You Missed in History Class episodes "The Great Leap Forward" (September 1, 2014), "The Great Famine" (September 8, 2014), "China's Cultural Revolution: Red Guard and Purges" (September 15, 2014), and "China's Cultural Revolution: Rewriting a Nation" (September 17, 2014).

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and it's October one.

(00:21):
On this day. In nineteen forty nine, Mao Zadong established
the People's Republic of China. Mao Zadong was born in
Hunan Province on December twenty six, eighteen ninety three, and
at that point China was still under imperial rule. The
emperor abdicated in nineteen twelve following a revolution when Mao
was eighteen. He trained as a teacher for a time
before working at a university library in Beijing, and he

(00:44):
became interested in Marxism, and then in nineteen twenty one
he became a founder member of the Chinese Communist Party,
or the CCP. Between nineteen three and nineteen forty nine,
the CCP was sometimes allied with, but sometimes at war with,
another party, the Koming Tang Nationalist Party or KMT. The

(01:04):
CCP and the KMT united to drive war lords out
from northern China and to fight Japan during the Second
Sign of Japanese War, and that ran from seven to nine.
But between those two events and before and after they
were not united. They were adversaries. After the Sino Japanese
War ended, the CCP and the KMT went to war

(01:27):
against each other, and the CCP one that is when
on October one of nineteen forty nine, Male founded the
People's Republic of China. At this point, China was very poor.
It was the mostly agrarian nation that was covering from
years and years of warfare. At first, the government's primary
goal of this newly established People's Republic of China was

(01:49):
just to recover from the war. There was widespread damage
to both the nation's agricultural and industrial systems. They got
support in this from the Soviet Union, and they followed
the Soviet Union's model on how to modernize both industry
and the economy. In the process of all this modernization
and all this recovery, China moved from a capitalist supply

(02:11):
and demand model to a socialist model, and China nationalized
a lot of its industries. By nineteen fifty six, virtually
all of the major industries in China were either state
owned or joint public private enterprises, and then by seven
almost all of China's farms were part of a collective.
In a lot of ways, these first five years were

(02:34):
a success. There were good harvests, there were a lot
of modernizations. People got better farm equipment, that sort of thing.
But at the same time, all of these modernizations really
strained the Chinese economy. Those good harvests were paired with
a population boom, so while the harvests were bigger, there
were also more people to feed. All the improvements propelled

(02:56):
the nation forward faster than the agriculture and the infrastructure
could keep up. The government had achieved its goals, but
the people of China a lot of times felt like
they were not better off than before, and this led
to the first of many attempts at wide scale reforms
that Chairman Mau implemented while he was ruling China. These

(03:18):
were often efforts to completely change the People's Republic of
China and the way its government worked. The Chinese government
under Mao Zadog built new hospitals and schools, and funded
new scientific and medical research, and the life expectancy in
China increased from thirty five years in nineteen forty nine
to sixty five years in nineteen eighty, but so so

(03:39):
many of the attempted reforms did a lot more harm
than good. Chairman Mao's rule over the People's Republic of
China was marked by extensive campaigns for modernization and improvement,
but also with massacres and famines and purges and huge
social unrest and the widespread destruction of Chinese works of art, architecture,
and culture. In nineteen seventy one, there was an attempted

(04:03):
coup and an attempt on mal Zadong's life. He died
on September nine, nineteen seventies six. You can learn more
about China under Chairman Mao in the four part series
from Stuff You Miss in History Class, including the Great
Leap Forward on September one, the Great Famine on September eight,
and the two parts on the Cultural Revolution on September

(04:25):
fifteenth and seventeen. All of that again is in thanks
to Tari Harrison for her audio work on this podcast,
and you can subscribe to This Day in History Class
on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, and where a Real to
get your podcasts. You can Tune in tomorrow for a
massacre