Establishing the New Democracy: - The Peoples Republic of China government was established in . It was based on the principles of the ‘New Democracy’, an alliance of all social classes, unlike the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’* that the Soviet Union said it had established. Critical areas of the economy were put under government control, and private enterprise and private ownership of land were gradually ended. This programme lasted till when the government declared that it would launch a programme of socialist transformation.
The Great Leap Forward movement launched in was a policy to galvanise the country to industrialise rapidly. People were encouraged to set up steel furnaces in their backyards. In the rural areas, people’s communes (where land would be collectively owned *This term was used by Karl Marx to stress that the working class would replace the repressive government of the propertied class with a revolutionary government and not a dictatorship in the current sense. Photograph of soldiers on the Long March reclaiming wasteland, .
M AP : The Long March and cultivated) were started. By , there were , communes covering per cent of the farm population. Mao was able to mobilise the masses to attain the goals set by the Party. His concern was with creating a ‘socialist man’ who would have five loves: fatherland, people, labour, science and public property.
Mass organisations were created for farmers, women, students and other groups. For instance, the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation had million members, the All-China Students Federation . million members. These objectives and methods did not appeal to everyone in the Party.
In - , some were urging for more attention to industrial organisation and economic growth. Liu Shaochi ( - ) and Deng Xiaoping ( - ) tried to modify the commune system as it was not working efficiently. The steel produced in the backyard furnaces was unusable industrially.