The Chinese Revolution

1949: the most populous state on earth chose Marxism — and remade itself by famine and decree.

The brief

On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong stood on the Gate of Heavenly Peace before the Forbidden City and announced the founding of the People's Republic of China. He led a peasant army that, against essentially every prediction, had beaten the better-armed, American-backed Nationalists in a four-year civil war, taken the cities, and brought a quarter of humanity under Communist rule; the defeated Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with the gold reserves and the air force. The Communists had begun the 1930s as fugitives, all but annihilated, surviving the Long March of 1934–35 hiding in mountain caves at Yan'an. Twenty years later they ruled the most populous state on earth. The line Mao spoke that autumn — that China had 'stood up' — framed everything that came after as the end of a century of humiliation.

What followed was a thirty-year experiment in mobilization-by-decree whose costs are still being counted. The first years brought a land reform that redistributed fields to hundreds of millions and consolidated Communist support in the countryside while killing perhaps a million people, many of them branded landlords; then a Korean war fought the United States to a standstill. Then came the catastrophes. The Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1962, tried to overtake the West by herding peasants into giant communes and smelting useless steel in backyard furnaces; cadres inflated harvest figures, grain was requisitioned against those phantom numbers for export while the countryside starved. It produced the largest famine in human history — estimates run from 30 to 45 million dead. The Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966 partly to recover the authority the famine had cost him, set teenage Red Guards loose to attack their own teachers, parents, and Party officials in pursuit of ideological purity; schools and universities closed for years, the economy seized, factional fighting turned to gun battles, and the country turned on itself for a decade. Mao died in 1976 having set the bar for political damage inflicted by a single ruler in peacetime. Within two years his eventual successor Deng Xiaoping reversed nearly every economic policy — decollectivizing agriculture under the household-responsibility system, opening Special Economic Zones at Shenzhen and elsewhere, inviting foreign capital and technology — and unleashed the reform that would, over forty years, lift more people out of poverty faster than any episode in history. The current Chinese state is best read as Deng's correction of Mao, retaining the one-party monopoly while abandoning the economics, with Mao's portrait still hanging on the gate.

Why nowChina is now the world's second-largest economy and its largest manufacturing power, the workshop and increasingly the laboratory of the planet. The questions that remain — whether Leninist political control can survive a middle-class society, whether prosperity can substitute for the legitimacy a ballot would confer, whether the Party can manage a peer rivalry with the United States — are arguably the most consequential live questions in geopolitics. Under Xi Jinping the answer offered has been more control, not less, reversing Deng's collective leadership; and the answers that emerge will shape supply chains, technology standards, and the balance of power for the rest of the century.