Like all revolutionary movements that succeed in taking power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was faced with immense challenges in 1949. The more obvious and immediate of these challenges were external: how to take power, quash lingering resistance, restore social order, resettle refugees, and begin the process of restoring a war-ravaged economy. The last of these involved conundrums that the Guomindang had failed miserably at: taming hyperinflation, reopening factories, and ensuring that cities that could not feed themselves had sufficient grain. The internal challenges facing the CCP were no less severe, if not quite as visible; how the CCP was to transform itself from what was, in the words of Kenneth Jowitt, a “party of a new type – a combat party” that had quite literally been engaged in actual combat in the course of a lengthy civil war into a civilian party-state, albeit a still revolutionary one with a mission to fundamentally remake society into a revolutionarily pure one.1 The objective circumstances that the CCP had to work with were at best difficult: thin coverage of an enormous and varied territory, primitive communications, and an indifferent-to-hostile population in much of central and southern China.

After laying out the substantial challenges faced by the young People’s Republic of China in 1949, this chapter focuses on the particular ways in which revolutionary policies were implemented: by an ever shifting mix of bureaucratic and campaign modalities that were supported by a range of public performances. Bureaucracy was characterized by hierarchy, order, precedent, the strengthening of formal state institutions and a mania for classification, thus radically simplifying complex realities through a process of disaggregation; campaigns mobilized moral commitments through a different type of radical simplification – fusion into morally charged narratives and popular mobilization. Both modalities were in evidence in the two signature campaigns of 1951: the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and land reform. While, in the early 1950s, bureaucratic and campaign modalities were co-constitutive, after the mid 1950s, they were more often in stark tension with each other.

This chapter examines the petition system in the early People’s Republic of China. While the state’s policies related to “handling letters and visits from the people” were in some ways a continuation of long-standing traditions, this chapter argues that Maoist political culture reshaped letters-and-visits work in revolutionary ways. Interacting with the people by answering their letters and talking with them in government reception offices were two of the concrete tasks associated with the implementation of the Communist Party’s most fundamental governance strategy, the mass line. Work with letters and visits was one of the instruments Party leaders themselves used to observe and gauge the nature and success of their mass-line work. Documents from this endeavor certainly show that the people’s views were not consistently represented in political discourse and that mass-line rhetoric did sometimes aid Party Central in its more authoritarian endeavors. However, the history of letters and visits also reveals that the early PRC state was never able to fully realize the potential of petitions as a surveillance tool. At the same time, the central importance of mass-line discourse gave both rhetorical and practical power to ordinary people, in ways that had marked effects on state and society.

In the third part of this volume, we would like to demonstrate that everyday realities in 1950s China could vary from the bigger revolutionary picture drawn by the Party for New China.

The transformation of the film industry was tightly bound up with the plan of the Chinese Communist Party for creating the new nation and its socialist culture and the “revolutionization” of film stars was an essential part of it. This chapter focuses on the story of one individual, the actress Li Ming, who started out as a military arts soldier in the New Fourth Army, to illustrate the everyday politics at the Shanghai Film Studio in the 1950s. Li Ming suffered an identity crisis as both actress and party cadre, witnessed the complicated relationship between the new nation and film stars, and experienced the impact of the “organization” on her new individual career. From a perspective of “the party’s own,” her story provides us with an intriguing way to understand the revolutionary cultural agenda, examine the degree to which the power of the Party permeated the grassroots, and comprehend the everyday politics in the socialist transformation of the urban culture.

The chapter provides an overview of the burgeoning historiography of the People’s Republic of China, especially of the early period between 1949 and 1978, and suggests how we might integrate this new work into narratives of the Chinese past and present. In working through the research of the past thirty years the findings not only help us identify new areas of research, bur also rephrase some of the initial questions. The chapter highlights areas in which reconsidering PRC history seems especially necessary: transnational flows, violence and social transformation.

In Mao’s China (1949–1976), coal shortage limited industrialization and economic growth. Under the conditions of a Western embargo, the adoption of Soviet mining technology in accordance with the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance (1950) was the only choice when the Chinese coal mining industry was predominantly manual and needed mechanization to increase its output.

The Soviet and Chinese documents examined in this chapter from 1956 to 1965 on Sino-Soviet co-operation in science and technology in the coal industry reveal a genuine sense of fraternal co-operation but different managerial cultures within the socialist ecumene, with not only different expectations but also different ways of doing things and very different resource bases. This chapter provides new insights into China’s position in the Eastern Bloc and vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The findings confound our understanding of this period as one of deep ideological hostility on the part of the PRC party-state toward the capitalist West, showing instead that in international trade and co-operation, the priority was not ideology but rather economic development.

Huang Hongjiu is a ninety-year-old former PRC athlete in swimming and water polo. Born and raised in Indonesia, he attended the World Festival for Youth and Students held in Berlin in 1951 – as a member of the Indonesian delegation. The delegation was invited to Beijing, where Chinese sports leaders then recruited Huang and several teammates to “return to the motherland” and help build a new state-sponsored swimming program. Over the next few years, Huang and the others learned Chinese and competed internationally for the PRC. This chapter seeks to understand how athletes such as Huang, and the networks within which they were embedded, were crucial to the Chinese party-state’s national project of the early 1950s. Athletes like Huang helped a nascent PRC initiate new state-sponsored sports programs and, through sport, solidify the new state’s participation in the Soviet-led socialist world. Tracing the lives of these athletes and early PRC sports networks shows how China’s national sports development was a thoroughly transnational project. This chapter also uses sport in order to argue more generally that a transnational perspective is needed to understand the early PRC.

In a very influential and frequently cited article published twenty-five years ago, William Kirby compellingly argued that Chinese history before 1949 was defined and shaped by the nature of its foreign interactions.1 This would appear to be all the more true of China under Communist rule in the 1950s. If the Guomindang regime styled itself “Nationalist” in English, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was, from its conception, internationalist in premise and in promise. Indeed, when Mao Zedong declared that the Chinese people had finally “stood up” with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949, he made it clear that they would not stand alone but would stand by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its allies.2 Stalin and Mao may often have been “uncertain partners,”3 but the People’s Republic of China in its formative years would be Moscow’s most faithful and self-sacrificing ally, a distinction earned in blood in Korea and by the fact that, unlike the Eastern European “people’s democracies,” the PRC’s allegiance was not bought at gunpoint.

This chapter brings together two seemingly separate aspects of Hainan Island’s history during the Chinese Communist revolution and into the early People’s Republic. These two aspects are the anti-localism political campaigns of the 1950s through which local leadership was punished or removed for favoring local priorities over national ones, and the relatively high revolutionary participation by women in the Communist fighting forces of Hainan. This chapter uses recent Chinese and Western scholarship, as well as memoir and oral history, to examine how traditional gender roles were reinforced through the anti-localism campaigns, even during what were otherwise some of the most radical moments of the early PRC. The popular revolutionary drama Red Detachment of Women took several forms, including ballet and opera, and as a cultural artifact it stood in for the history of women fighters on Hainan from its first performances in the early 1960s. Like the anti-localism campaigns, Red Detachment of Women, as a didactic drama, reinforced patriarchal and mainland control over Hainan, and this chapter aims to illuminate some of the ways in which this happened.

This chapter mainly discusses the process of Shanghai evacuating a large number of urban population from the city in the early days of the founding of the people’s Republic of China by sending “refugees” and “victims” home, mobilizing farmers to return home for production, and calling on urban residents to migrate and reclaim wasteland, and changing their identity into farmers through land reform, joining co-operatives or establishing collective farms.The Communist Party of China reduces the urban population and consumption through these methods, aiming to realize the strategy of industrialization as soon as possible and build a strong socialist country.

Making the People’s Republic of China appear great after 1949 was a technically and organizationally complex problem that required the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mobilize all of the cultural resources at its disposal. Messianism about China’s greatness was an important aspect of Mao’s charisma as a leader, and this message was in turn disseminated internationally through repeated reference to the uniqueness and success of China’s revolutionary “path,” particularly within decolonizing Asia. When confronted with the dilemma of how to engage with nonsocialist countries, or those for which revolution was a more distant concern, the CCP’s response was instead to engage in more generic forms of cultural diplomacy which highlighted China’s achievements as a great and developing nation. International cultural display was therefore a relatively low-cost approach to signaling greatness and earning respect even in settings where relations were not carried out on a basis of socialist “fraternity.”

This chapter examines the resulting sequence of steps taken by the CCP to globally communicate China’s greatness and legitimacy. Its main focus is the film industry, which played a significant role in the dissemination of information about China’s post-1949 reconstruction during the politically turbulent Korean War period. By the mid-1950s, the PRC’s nascent international cultural infrastructure stretched from Geneva to Jakarta, underpinned by cultural industries and politically directed exchange networks at home. Mao’s promise to make the world see China as civilized first required that the world be made to see – as influence expanded, recognition of China’s greatness would surely follow

The history of the People’s Republic of China as a field of study has changed beyond recognition over the last quarter-century. Once covered primarily by political scientists and the occasional sociologist, PRC history now is a recognized area of study in the West, with its own e-journals, Facebook groups, and hires in history departments. A generation of superb historians and their graduate students also have emerged, albeit more cautiously, in the PRC itself. Both Chinese and foreign scholars have produced what has amounted to a remarkable explosion of work in the last two decades, much of it in Chinese, some of it in English or German. The combination of increasingly accessible Chinese archives and individuals within China increasingly willing to speak openly about the post-1949 period created a research environment in which it was not long before thoughtfully edited volumes ensued that confounded old understandings and shed new light on specific periods of PRC history.