60 Years of the People's Republic of China

On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong stood on the great Tiananmen Gate and announced the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China. It was a decisive moment in world history. After more than a century of chaos, foreign intervention and civil war, China had stood up. Over the next three decades China struggled to feed its desperately poor, largely agricultural population who were cut off from the rest of the world. Rapid industrialization and the establishment of collective agriculture had brought about some economic gains by the mid-fifties, but Mao’s policies became increasingly utopian and divorced from reality. The establishment of people’s communes was pushed through without regard for the huge human cost. By 1960 the country was experiencing serious famine in which more than 20 million people perished. In 1966 Mao launched the catastrophic experiment of the Cultural Revolution to purge his own Party and create a “socialist new man” living in a socialist utopia.