China after the death of Mao
Perhaps never before in human history had a political leader unleashed such massive forces against the system that he had created. The resulting damage to that system was profound, and the goals that Mao Zedong sought to achieve ultimately remained elusive. The agenda he left behind for his successors was extraordinarily challenging.
Domestic developments
Readjustment and recovery
Mao’s death and the purge of the Gang of Four left Hua Guofeng, a compromise candidate elevated to the premiership by Mao following the purge of Deng Xiaoping, as the chairman of the CCP and thus the official leader of China. Hua tried to consolidate his position by stressing his ties to Mao and his fidelity to Mao’s basic ideas, but many others in the top leadership wanted to move away from these issues, and Hua’s position eroded over the remainder of the decade. Furthermore, Hua’s successor as party chairman, Hu Yaobang, helped abolish the chairmanship in 1982 in response to concerns that one person might again become too powerful within the party; however, he remained as general secretary.
The ambivalent legacies of the Cultural Revolution were reflected in the members of the Political Bureau chosen just after the 11th Party Congress had convened in August 1977. Like Hua Guofeng, almost half of the members were individuals whose careers had benefited from the Cultural Revolution; the other half were, like Deng Xiaoping, the Cultural Revolution’s victims. While a balance between the two groups would be reached only after a period of years, in the short run the tide quickly shifted in favor of the latter group.
Economic policy changes
In the late fall of 1976, the CCP leadership tried to bring some order to the country through a series of national conferences. They moved quickly to appeal to workers’ interests by reinstating wage bonuses. The economy had stagnated that year largely because of political turmoil, and Mao’s successors were anxious to start things moving again. Despite some uncertainty, Deng was rehabilitated and formally brought back into his previous offices in the summer of 1977.
Lacking detailed information on the economy, the leaders adopted an overly ambitious 10-year plan in early 1978 and used the government’s resources to the limit throughout that year to increase investment and achieve rapid economic growth. Much of that growth consisted of reactivating capacity that had lain idle because of political disruption. Future growth would be harder to achieve, and long-term trends in matters such as capital-output ratios made it increasingly clear that the old strategies would be less effective.
One of the major changes of 1978 was China’s sharp turn toward participation in the international economy. While in the 1970s there had been a resumption of the foreign trade that had been largely halted in the late 1960s, along with far-more-active and Western-oriented diplomatic initiatives, the changes during and after 1978 were fundamental. China’s leaders became convinced that large amounts of capital could be acquired from abroad to speed up the country’s modernization, a change in attitude that elicited an almost frenetic response from foreign bankers and entrepreneurs.
These several strands came together in late 1978 at a major meeting of the CCP leadership, when China formally agreed to establish full diplomatic relations with the United States. China’s leaders also formally adopted the Four Modernizations as the country’s highest priority, with all other tasks to be subordinated to that of economic development. This set of priorities differed so fundamentally from those pursued during the Cultural Revolution that the implications for future policy and for the interests of various sectors of the population were profound.
The opening of China’s economy to the outside world proceeded apace. In the late 1970s the country adopted a joint-venture law, and it subsequently enacted numerous other laws (such as one governing patents) to create an attractive environment for foreign capital. An initial experiment with “special economic zones” along the southern coast in the late 1970s led in 1984 to a decision to open 14 cities to more intense engagement with the international economy. The idea was to move toward opening ever larger sections of the country to foreign trade and investment, which was accomplished with remarkable success over the next decades. Those zones became the engines driving China’s tremendous and sustained economic growth, and the cities associated with them mushroomed in size—none more so than Shenzhen, which grew from a town of about 30,000 in 1979 to a metropolis of some 7,500,000 in little more than a quarter century.
Within the domestic economy, numerous experiments were undertaken in finance, banking, planning, urban economic management, and rural policy. Of these, by far the most important were the series of measures taken toward the roughly four-fifths of the population that lived in the countryside at the time. Prices paid for farm products were sharply increased in 1979, thus pumping significant additional resources into the agricultural sector. The collective farming system was gradually dismantled in favor of a return to family farming. At first, families were allowed to contract for the use of collective land for a limited period of time. Subsequently, the period of those contracts was extended, and subcontracting (essentially, allowing one family to accumulate large amounts of land) was permitted.
Farmers were also allowed far greater choice in what crops to plant, and many abandoned farming altogether in favor of establishing small-scale industries or transport companies and other services. Thus, rural patterns of work, land leasing, and wealth changed markedly after 1978. Exceptionally good weather during the early 1980s contributed to record harvests.
The reforms in the urban economy had more-mixed results, largely because the economic system in the cities was so much more complex. Those reforms sought to provide material incentives for greater efficiency and to increase the use of market forces in allocating resources. Problems arose because of the relatively irrational price system, continuing managerial timidity, and the unwillingness of government officials to give up their power over economic decisions, among other difficulties. In the urban as well as the rural economy, the reformers tackled some of the fundamental building blocks of the Soviet system that had been imported during the 1950s.
Reforms have continued in the rural and urban areas. Rural producers have been given more freedom to decide how to use their earnings, whether for agricultural or other economic activities. Private entrepreneurship in the cities and the rationalization, privatization, and, in some cases, dismantling of state-owned enterprises have gained speed. At the same time, the central government has moderated the pace of change—primarily to avoid increases in social unrest resulting from rising unemployment—and constructed a social safety net for those who lose their jobs.
Political developments
The reformers led by Deng Xiaoping tried after 1978 to reduce the level of political coercion in Chinese society. Millions of victims of past political campaigns were released from labor camps, and bad “class labels” were removed from those stigmatized by them. This dramatically improved the career and social opportunities of millions of former political pariahs. To a considerable extent, moreover, the range of things considered political was narrowed, so that mundane elements such as style of dress and grooming and preferences in music and hobbies were no longer considered politically significant. More important, criticizing policy no longer triggered political retaliation against the critics. Overall, the role of the Public Security (police) forces was cut back substantially.
The reformers also tried to make preparations for their own political succession. This involved first rehabilitating cadres who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution (most of which was accomplished in the late 1970s). These cadres in many cases were old and no longer fully able to meet the demands being made on them, and they were encouraged to retire. Younger, better-educated people committed to reform were then brought into prominent positions. Deng proved masterful at maintaining a viable coalition among the diverse forces at the top. By the end of 1981 he had succeeded in nudging Hua Guofeng and others of the more-rigid Maoists out of high-level positions. Although he refused to take the top positions for himself, Deng saw his supporters become premier (Zhao Ziyang and then Li Peng) and general secretary of the CCP (Hu Yaobang, Zhao, and Jiang Zemin), and he worked hard to try to consolidate and maintain their hold on power.
In early 1982 the CCP leadership made a concerted attempt to restructure the leading bodies in both the government and the party, and much was reorganized, with the appointment of many new officials. This general effort continued, with the focus increasingly on the bloated military establishment, but progress slowed considerably after the initial burst of organizational reformism.
Throughout 1982–85 the CCP carried out a “rectification” campaign designed to restore morals to its membership and weed out those who did not support reform. This campaign highlighted the increasing difficulties inherent in maintaining discipline and limiting corruption at a time of rapid change, when materialistic values were being officially propagated.
By the mid-1980s, China was in transition, with core elements of the previous system called into question while the ultimate balance that would be struck remained unclear even to the top participants. The reform movement began to sour in 1985. Financial decentralization and the two-price system combined with other factors to produce inflation and encourage corruption. China’s population, increasingly exposed to foreign ideas and standards of living, put pressure on the government to speed the rate of change within the country.
These forces produced open unrest within the country in late 1986 and again on a much larger scale in the spring of 1989. By 1989 popular disaffection with the CCP and the government had become widespread. Students—eventually joined by many others—took to the streets in dozens of cities from April to June to demand greater freedom and other changes. Government leaders, after initial hesitation, used the army to suppress this unrest in early June (most visibly in Tiananmen Square), with substantial loss of life. China’s elderly revolutionaries then reverted to more-conservative economic, political, and cultural policies in an attempt to reestablish firm control. In 1992, however, Deng Xiaoping publicly criticized what he called the country’s continuing “leftism” and sought to renew the efforts at economic reform. Economic growth had been especially remarkable in southern China, which had developed the highest concentration of private-sector enterprise. Since the mid-1990s the CCP has worked to drastically accelerate market reforms in banking, taxes, trade, and investments. These reforms have continued, and the party has attempted to increase public support by conducting energetic anti-corruption campaigns that rely in part on high-profile prosecutions and occasional executions of high-level officials accused of corruption. However, since the mid-2020s the CCP has struggled to contain several economic issues, including real estate bubbles, municipal indebtedness, and a long-term deceleration of economic growth.
Jiang proved to be a capable successor to Deng. He replaced Zhao Ziyang as general secretary in 1989 after the Tiananmen incident and also that year was named chair of the Central Military Commission (CMC). In 1993 Jiang became president of the National People’s Congress (NPC). He combined a pragmatic, reform-minded economic policy with an insistence that the party maintain strong control over the government. Jiang consolidated his power after Deng’s death in 1997 to become China’s paramount ruler but gradually relinquished his posts to Hu Jintao in 2002–04. In turn, in 2012, as Hu neared the end of his presidential term, China’s vice president, Xi Jinping, was positioned to succeed him, and that November Xi took over both as general secretary of the party and as chair of the CMC. Hu stepped down from the presidency in March 2013 after Xi was elected to the office by the NPC.
The future of orderly presidential transfers of power after one or two terms appeared uncertain in 2018, when the NPC passed amendments to the constitution including one that eliminated term limits for the president. This change allowed Xi to rule beyond 2023, when he had been expected to step down after two terms. The amendments, hailed by some analysts as the most significant changes to the country’s constitution since 1982, also allowed for the creation of a powerful anti-corruption agency and solidified the primacy of the CCP in government. Xi was reelected to a third term as the general secretary of the CCP in 2022. In March 2023 Xi secured an unprecedented third five-year term as president of China.
Meanwhile, however, the government became increasingly unwilling to tolerate political criticism in the period leading up to and during the political transition that was underway by the mid-1980s, and several prominent dissidents were imprisoned or had their freedoms curtailed. Notable among the jailed was Liu Xiaobo—who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Peace, much to the anger and embarrassment of Chinese authorities. Another prominent critic of the government, the artist Ai Weiwei, was subject to harassment by officials over alleged tax violations.
On October 1, 2009, China observed the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic with a large military parade in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Chinese-made fighter aircraft, tanks, and other military equipment were on display, along with great numbers of military personnel. This demonstration of the country’s armed might—coupled with its now-commanding presence on the world economic scene and its growing international diplomatic profile—indicated the progress that China had made in the previous decade at becoming a global superpower. Perhaps as proof of this, in 2010 China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy, behind only the United States.
Educational and cultural policy changes
In education, the reformers gave top priority to training technical, scientific, and scholarly talent to world-class standards. This involved re-creating a highly selective and elitist system of higher education, with admission based on competitive academic examination. Graduate study programs were introduced, and thousands of Chinese were sent abroad for advanced study. Large numbers of foreign scholars were also used to help upgrade the educational system. Somewhat ironically, the value the reformers attached to making money had the unintended consequence of encouraging many brilliant people to forgo intellectual careers in favor of more-lucrative undertakings. The range of cultural fare available was broadened greatly, and new limits were constantly tested. Few groups had suffered so bitterly as China’s writers and artists, and policies since the 1980s have reflected the ongoing battle between cultural liberals and more-orthodox officials.
COVID-19 outbreak
COVID-19, a highly contagious respiratory illness, was first detected in Wuhan, China, in 2019 and rapidly spread throughout the country and the world, giving rise to a multiyear pandemic that resulted in millions of deaths worldwide. In efforts to keep the disease from spreading, China implemented strict “zero-COVID” policies aimed at keeping the number of cases as close to zero as possible through measures including strict lockdowns, quarantines, and mass testing. As a result, infection cases and deaths were relatively lower in China compared with other wealthy countries. Despite residents’ initial support of government policies and China’s early success in containing the spread of the disease, many grew frustrated as the restrictions became harsher and longer due to an increased number of cases resulting from highly transmissible variants. Repeated lockdowns and testing disrupted residents’ daily life and travel across the country. Some parts of China, such as Yining and Guiyang, experienced shortages of food and other essential items. The zero-COVID policies were eased in December 2022 following a rare protest by thousands of Chinese residents demanding that the government end the harsh policies, some even calling for the resignation of Xi Jinping.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaAllegations of human rights abuses
After the establishment of the autonomous region in the 1950s, large numbers of Han (ethnic Chinese) began moving into Xinjiang, which had long been home to the Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking people. The influx became especially pronounced after 1990, and by the late 20th century the Han constituted two-fifths of Xinjiang’s total population. Over time economic disparities and ethnic tensions grew between the Uyghur and Han populations and eventually resulted in protests and other disturbances. A particularly violent outbreak occurred in July 2009, mainly in Ürümqi, in which it was reported that nearly 200 people (mostly Han) were killed and some 1,700 were injured. Violent incidents increased after that and included attacks by knife-wielding assailants and by suicide bombers. Chinese authorities responded by cracking down on Uyghurs suspected of being dissidents and separatists. The authorities’ actions included shootings, arrests, and long jail sentences until 2017, when the Chinese government initiated a thorough crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Citing a need for greater security, the government set up cameras, checkpoints, and constant police patrols in Uyghur-dominated areas. The most controversial governmental undertaking—which was met by protests from human rights organizations—was the indefinite detention of up to one million Uyghurs in “political training centers,” heavily fortified buildings that were likened to the reeducation camps of the Mao Zedong era. In August 2018 the United Nations called upon China to end the detention, but government officials denied the existence of the camps.
In January 2021 the United States announced that China was committing genocide against Uyghurs because of its use of internment camps and forced birth control and abortions. A few months later, the United States, along with the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union, imposed sanctions on top Chinese officials. In 2022 the United Nations’ human rights office released a long-awaited report that accused China of committing “serious human rights violations,” which may be crimes against humanity. China rejected the report’s findings and called it a “farce.”
International relations
True reintegration of the People’s Republic of China into the international community can be said to date to 1971, when it replaced Taiwan (Republic of China; ROC) as China’s representative to the United Nations. With that event, many countries that formerly had recognized the ROC established relations with the People’s Republic. The normalization of diplomatic ties with the United States, which began in 1973, culminated in 1979.
China’s foreign policy since the mid-1970s generally has reflected the country’s preoccupation with domestic economic development and its desire to promote a peaceful and stable environment in which to achieve these domestic goals. Except for its disagreement with Vietnam over that country’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978, China has by and large avoided disputes and encouraged the peaceful evolution of events in Asia. China adopted a policy of “one country, two systems” in order to provide a framework for the successful negotiation with Great Britain for the return of Hong Kong and adjacent territories in 1997 and with Portugal for the return of Macau in 1999; both were given special administrative status. Furthermore, China became an advocate of arms control and assumed a more-constructive, less-combative stance in many international organizations.
The bloody suppression of the demonstrations in 1989 set back China’s foreign relations. The United States, the European Community (later succeeded by the European Union), and Japan imposed sanctions, though by 1992 China had largely regained its international standing with all but the United States. But by the mid-1990s both sides had taken steps toward improved relations, and China retained its most-favored-nation status in U.S. trade—subject to annual review by the U.S. Congress until 2000, when Congress made the status permanent.
The collapse of communism in eastern Europe beginning in mid-1989 and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union deeply disturbed China’s leaders. While hard-liners used these developments to warn about the dangers of reform, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin were able to minimize such backsliding and move China closer to becoming a major world power. The country’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was considered a significant step in its further integration into the global economy. Added to that was the international prestige that accompanied Beijing’s selection to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. The Games, which included events held in six other Chinese cities, were generally considered a great success. Two years later, the country staged the highly successful Expo 2010 Shanghai China world exposition, which showcased what was by then one of the world’s largest and most technologically advanced metropolises. Beijing was selected to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, which some analysts argued were used to “sportswash” China’s widely criticized human rights violations against the Uyghur Muslim people and other Turkic enclaves.
Kenneth G. Lieberthal The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaRelations with Taiwan
A major unresolved issue in the region has been the status of Taiwan. Since 1949 the regimes on both the mainland and Taiwan have agreed that Taiwan is a province of China—the principal difference being that each has asserted it is the legitimate government of the country. Tensions were especially high between the two entities in the first decades after the split, marked by periodic artillery duels between batteries on the Taiwan-controlled islands of Matsu and Qemoy, just off the coast of Fujian province, and those opposite them on the mainland. The ROC’s claim of legitimacy was dealt a serious blow after 1970 with its loss of UN representation and diplomatic recognition by most of the world’s countries. Still, Taiwan remained viable and emerged as a global economic powerhouse, its security guaranteed by a commitment from the United States and backed by U.S. military presence in the region. The continued American involvement in Taiwan affairs has at times been a source of friction in U.S.-China relations.
Through all this, economic ties improved considerably between the mainland and Taiwan. Taiwan has become one of China’s major trading partners, Taiwan-based businesses have invested heavily on the mainland, and large numbers of people from the island have come to live and work on the mainland. Beijing has continued to press for reintegrating Taiwan as a province of China under mainland administration. However, there has been a sustained movement on Taiwan advocating that the island become an independent sovereign state and not continue to be considered a part of China. Tensions escalated after the pro-independence Chen Shui-bian was elected president of the ROC in 2000. Nonetheless, discussions continued between the two sides, and in 2005 high-ranking Nationalist Party (KMT) officials traveled to the mainland, the first such visits since 1949.
Tensions between China and Taiwan eased significantly after the Nationalists regained control of both Taiwan’s legislature and presidency in 2008. Talks, often at a high level, continued and increased between the two sides on both economic and diplomatic issues. A notable accomplishment of these discussions was a trade agreement, signed in 2010, that would gradually reduce or eliminate tariffs on a large number of goods and commodities exported from one side to the other.
In January 2016 Taiwan’s voters went to the polls and gave Tsai Ing-wen, chair of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), a resounding victory. She avoided mention of Taiwan independence, “one China,” and the 1992 Consensus (an agreement whereby both sides of the Taiwan Strait would accept one China but could define “China” differently).
This equation looked as if it might shift when the U.S. president-elect Donald Trump went against decades of diplomatic protocol by accepting a telephone call from Tsai in December 2016. It was the first conversation between leaders of the two governments since 1979, and it seemed to overturn the carefully calculated absence of formal diplomatic relations between Taiwan and the United States. That phone call prompted Beijing’s foreign ministry to lodge a formal complaint with the United States, though Tsai later said that the call did not signal a policy shift for Taiwan. Trump, for his part, recommitted the U.S. to the one-China policy in February 2017 during his first phone conversation as president with his Beijing counterpart, Xi Jinping. Nevertheless, in 2019 the Trump administration escalated the U.S. policy of selling arms to Taiwan by agreeing to provide tanks and missiles worth some $2.2 billion, along with 66 F-16C/D fighter jets at a cost of about $8 billion. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping intensified his call for Tsai to embrace the 1992 Consensus.
During this period tensions grew between China and Taiwan, as China’s ever-increasing military buildup seemingly heightened Taiwan’s risk of invasion. For its part, Taiwan increased its defense spending to nearly $17 billion in 2022 (with an additional $8.6 billion to be spent over the next five years), but that figure paled next to China’s massive outlay. In 2021 U.S. Pres. Joe Biden entered office and stepped up support for Taiwan with some $750 million of arms sales, and U.S. warships passed through the Taiwan Strait roughly monthly that year. However, in stating on more than one occasion that the United States would come to Taiwan’s aid if it were attacked by China, Biden appeared to abandon the policy of strategic ambiguity, heightening U.S.-China tensions even though White House officials qualified his statements and emphasized that U.S. policy regarding Taiwan had not changed. Against this backdrop the proliferation of incursions of Chinese warplanes into Taiwan’s airspace seemed all the more threatening, especially in a world that was trying to come to grips with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In August 2022 U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to travel to Taiwan in some 25 years. The Chinese government had strongly warned against the visit, which it regarded as provocatively enhancing Taiwan’s international standing. In late July, amid escalating tensions, Xi Jinping also had warned Biden in a phone meeting that the U.S. should not “play with fire” regarding Taiwan. In 2023 tensions spiked as China increased its military pressure on Taiwan by conducting large military drills and encircling the island with ships and aircraft, which in September included sending a record number of Chinese fighter jets (more than 100) toward Taiwan in 24-hour period.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica