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.Footnote ¹ We now have a wide range of monographs and edited volumes that provide new insights into the history of post-1949 China. Since full books invariably take somewhat longer than edited volumes, it wasn’t until the early 2010s that a series of monographs on the broad sweep of post-1949 history emerged. Some of the most notable authors of these works include Yang Kuisong, Shen Zhihua, and Zhang Jishun, all of whom offer new insights into such topics as the establishment of the key institutions of the PRC, the implementation of campaigns carried out in the early 1950s, and the urban history of Shanghai.Footnote ² Felix Wemheuer’s new social history of China focuses on questions of class, gender, ethnicity, and the urban–rural divide, thus analyzing the experiences of a range of social groups under Communist rule – workers, peasants, local cadres, intellectuals, “ethnic minorities,” the old elites, men and women – between 1949 and 1976. Yang Kuisong’s most recent work has a similarly broad sweep that draws on the dramatic social transformations at all levels after the establishment of the PRC in 1949.Footnote ³

Some of this turn to PRC history revises the conventional received wisdom: work on land reform suggests that it was not nearly as popular or demanded from below as the standard histories suggest.Footnote ⁴ Daniel Leese’s study provides new insights into the question of how the state has dealt with the injustices of the Mao era between 1976 and 1986.Footnote ⁵ After a first monograph on the Republican period, Ralph Thaxton built on his access in one village in north China to produce two more incredibly detailed studies that delve into the specifics of how local power holders acquired and maintained their status, how ordinary villagers survived the appalling conditions after the Great Leap Forward, and how they negotiated the assorted depredations of officials thereafter.Footnote ⁶ Jie Li provides new insights into societal activities which contest the official narratives by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Maoist China.Footnote ⁷ Unofficial histories published in Chinese and translated into English, such as Tombstone, have viscerally brought to light the suffering engendered by the mass starvation after the Great Leap Forward.Footnote ⁸ And the Cultural Revolution period has given rise to an entire cottage industry of publication, including memoirs, edited volumes, microhistories, and monographs.Footnote ⁹

The openness of China in the 2000s and early 2010s also made it possible to engage in telling the story of PRC history from the bottom up. Access to archives, the ability to interview, and the ready availability of materials in flea markets have all contributed to a wave of articles, edited volumes, and monographs of microhistories geared to in-depth analyses of the variety of different local realities and personal fates.Footnote ¹⁰ Access to individuals willing and able to tell their stories has opened up a whole new level of historical texture and immediacy: Felix Wemheuer’s and Wang Ning’s studies, for example, draw from personal memories of witnesses and other grassroots’ sources such as labor farm archives.Footnote ¹¹ There are also journals published in China – with and without official publication licenses – with articles based on the oral histories of those who were variably implementers of and witnesses to the great policies unleashed over the course of the Mao years.Footnote ¹²

With this wealth of new sources and different perspectives, scholars have also begun to integrate PRC history with other historical subfields in two distinct ways. First, historians whose early work was on the Republican period in such distinct areas as gender history and environmental history have definitively crossed the historical divide of 1949 and extended their work into the post-1949 era.Footnote ¹³ Second, the collapse of the Marxist–Leninist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in combination with a generation of distance from the politics and personalities of the pre-1989 period, has led to an outpouring of work in English and Chinese on Cold War history, reconsideration of the wider global socialist order of which China was a part, and comparative and transnational work on East Asia as a region.Footnote ¹⁴

Our volume makes two contributions to the field of PRC studies. First, it provides a more nuanced consideration of the foundational decade of the PRC by integrating two aspects that are usually considered separately: the relatively “happy” 1949–1956 period and the relatively “unhappy” period of 1957 and after; second, it considers the different scales at which history was articulated, from the systems level of bipolarism to the most local articulations of how individuals functioned within socialism.

With such a broad range of work already done on PRC history, it is surprising that until now there has been no overall consideration of the 1950s as the foundational decade of the PRC. The decade of the 1950s reveals, in all its contradictions, the ways in which the young PRC was a period of revolutionary transformations that were replete simultaneously with progressive enthusiasm and hope and with cruelty and waste. The progressivism and the cruelty both were inherent to the fundamental processes of revolutionary transformations, and were in clear evidence from the beginning, even as the ways in which we assess that mix continue to be debated today. The 1950s were indeed a foundational and a “swing” decade that began with optimism and ended in mass starvation. Attention needs to be paid to both the foundation and the swing. Insofar as the PRC still has a master history, it agrees on the importance of the early to mid-1950s as a positive period of high legitimacy and significant regime accomplishment. In this reckoning, the young PRC was enormously successful both externally and internally between 1949 and 1956. Externally, it fought the world’s then only superpower to a standstill in Korea, decisively reversing a century of military weakness and international humiliation. It also enjoyed high prestige in the developing world and was an important diplomatic presence both in Bandung for the inauguration of the nonaligned movement and in Geneva for the Geneva Accords of 1954. Domestically it tackled long-standing social problems (prostitution, opium addiction, mass unemployment), stabilized the economy by bringing hyperinflation under control, implemented such key revolutionary programs as land reform and the New Marriage Law, established the basic institutions of socialism (the planned economy, the work unit, the unified purchase and sale of grain), and managed to collectivize agriculture and nationalize urban enterprises without the violent resistance that had been so characteristic of collectivization in the Soviet Union. These processes of revolutionary transformation, and their putative successes, are inextricably linked with a wider narrative of how revolutionary China, and its people, rightfully “stood up” with socialism under the leadership of the CCP. Official histories do acknowledge that, after 1956, things went pear-shaped: starting with the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, worsening with the Great Leap Forward, and ultimately culminating in the ten years of chaos of the Cultural Revolution.Footnote ¹⁵ But there is little in the literature, particularly in the official literature, that integrates the “enthusiastic” early to mid-1950s with the “deeply tragic” post-1956 period of escalating tensions with the Soviet Union, domestic witch hunts, out-of-control campaigns, utopianism gone wrong, and mass starvation after the Great Leap Forward.

Because most of the studies published on the 1950s only look at one period (the early years of the People’s Republic or the later catastrophes such as the Great Leap Forward), one campaign, one locale, or one sector, there is a disconnect that runs through much of the literature that this volume seeks to rectify. Most of our chapters, even if they focus only on one period, locale, or sector, demonstrate how deeply connected the happier early 1950s were with the unhappier late 1950s.

What emerges is not simply a China, dominated by the CCP or its great leaders, but diversity on all levels and scales in how socialism was enacted and experienced. But this does not mean that we can forgo the CCP entirely. Mao’s and the Party’s vision of the world and their goals continued to set the conditions and agenda of the 1950s. Whereas Mao and his party were once seen as great (as, for instance, in Li Rui’s portrait of the young Mao) for their ability to muster power in the service of truth, the leadership of the CCP in this volume comes across as a distant, tragic hero forced by circumstances to place power ahead of truth. Ambitious and uncompromising, for the quarter-century before 1949 the CCP had fought from a position of disadvantage and uncertainty and won pre-eminence by taking enormous chances. For better, and also for worse, this Weltanschauung continued to shape choices throughout the foundational 1950s.

We also highlight the ways in which the unevenness of Party control led to discrepancies all across China, resulting in differences between different scales, from region to region and between the center and the locale. The lofty-sounding rhetoric of the “Resist America/Aid Korea” campaign may well have engendered mass rallies in urban China, but it did not resonate with the peasants in the north China countryside when it came to the recruitment of village youths to serve in the military. Basic expectations were often broken: Korean War POWs (prisoners of war) went home by routes of contingency, to circumstances beyond promises or logic. “Model woman worker” status did not guarantee any of the honored individuals a career of correctness with the people. Meanwhile, local cadres had agendas and priorities of their own. Local people deployed Party-sanctioned quasi-religious rhetoric in fights over economic gains. Provincial cadres overseeing coal projects bent world news to promote work unit objectives through the publication of leaflets. A growing number of people – from a multitude of subject positions inscribed by the Party – learned to play their parts in a master script that was expressly designed to privilege some over others.

When we turn to a global scale, it is clear that the new government faced equally daunting challenges such as a Western trade embargo and international isolation. In principle, the government articulated that it would rather perish than accept a position of subjugation. At the same time, the CCP demonstrated impressive skills and foresight with regard to the exploitation of USA–USSR strategic conflicts for China’s own gains. It seemed, for instance, to come out on top of a Korean War in which its soldiers were sacrificed in “human-wave” tactics, and in Bandung it gained respect by claiming to represent the Third World. But in practice, the new government was also frequently not experienced enough to effectively handle international affairs. PRC foreign policies, personally directed by Mao, appeared to be improvised and reactive. China’s international thinking fused elements of national interest and socialist brotherhood. On matters of territoriality or nationality, it continued to retain residues of Qing imperial assumptions about the relationships between the suzerain and tributary states. For instance, in Xinjiang or Tibet, the CCP continued without hesitation the nationalist policies of previous governments and without mercy enforced Chinese rule over non-Han Chinese ethnic groups.

China in the 1950s was an embattled country fighting for Mao’s vision of socialism, but this vision was replete with cross-cutting imperatives and irreconcilable internal tensions. Coastal cities in general – and Shanghai in particular – were understood as sites of corruption to be extirpated even as they were admired and needed for their high level of industrialization and economic productivity. The CCP both needed an extensive government bureaucracy to implement revolutionary programs and establish a planned economy, and deeply mistrusted all forms of hierarchical authority. The government implemented campaigns such as the Three Antis, the Four Cleanups, and the Cultural Revolution for the rectification and continued revolutionary purity of the CCP, but insisted that this be done through maintaining “close links to the people.” “The people” were imagined to be naturally revolutionary. Many urbanites indeed were, but there were also many groups that were hesitant or defiant. According to the Party, these “elements” needed to be either educated or, pour encourager les autres, made an example of and repressed. The 1950s, in short, was a decade of many challenges and much uncertainty. The PRC was able, by and large, to stabilize its control as a new regime. The CCP leadership continued, however, to see enemies and agents of subversion everywhere. The government was eager, by 1956, to declare the triumph of socialism in China, and, by its own lights, it had good reason to do so. But the very methods that led to its successes also sowed the seeds of larger, and eventually catastrophic, consequences. Powerful as the Central Committee of the CCP had become, power at the top, did not protect the center from the systemic falsification of information (thanks to the socialization of the cadres through rectification campaigns) coming up from the bottom. And, more prosaically, the government’s drive to establish control led either to the abandonment of its earlier principles or to the imposition of standard categories, which then led to profound suffering and waste.

Many of our chapters detail ways in which the government’s mania for uniform classification and direct control led to policies that diverged sharply from its own revolutionary rhetoric on such themes as gender equality and self-reliance (Murray and Serrano, Jing), that dispersed the long-term unemployed and the undesirable from big cities on the specious ground that they were really peasants (Ruan), or that imposed ill-conceived class categories on people in order to implement a land reform that was, contrary to regime proclamations, not particularly popular or desired from below (Strauss). Others point to the sheer difficulty of implementing the ideals of the revolution in the face of either technical realities (Belogurova) or the messily unreconstructed former cultural elites that the regime wanted to reform (Zhang). Here some of the smaller details in these chapters are especially telling. Belogurova illustrates how, even at the height of Sino-Soviet technical co-operation in the early to mid-1950s, Chinese technicians were reluctant to hand over the survey information on coal deposits that could have helped Soviet technicians devise the most appropriate technology transfer. Zhang draws out the frustration of the committed Party cadre at the rapidity with which the CCP’s cultural establishment not only was willing to accommodate and absorb decidedly non-revolutionary, if not outright decadent, pre-1949 film stars, but also stored up a world of trouble for exactly those stars when the campaigns of the later 1950s blew up. The unhappy late 1950s did not emerge suddenly out of nowhere; the very elements that gave rise to them were in evidence from very early in the history of the PRC. But unless one were of a bad class (e.g., landlords or local bullies), or were otherwise marginalized (female revolutionary fighters far away from Beijing, the urban unemployed), the sharper edges of the revolution were kept in check, only appearing in full force once the visible enemies (landlords, Guomindang holdovers, capitalists, and unreliable intellectuals) had been vanquished and the key institutions of socialism fully established.

The picture of the PRC in the 1950s that emerges from our volume is thus one of unfulfilled promises and departures from the ideals of socialism at the micro level: from the local cadres who didn’t ensure clean toilets to the tough female revolutionaries in Hainan who, once the revolution was won, were told to go home and bear children, to the elite swimmer who, having bought into the opportunity and promise of a career in New China, ended up quietly retiring to the Netherlands. In one way or another, all of our chapters illustrate in ways large and small that Chinese socialism under Mao didn’t quite work out the way things were supposed to. Perhaps this isn’t surprising. China’s scale, its poverty, and its recent history of civil war and foreign invasion laid down conditions that any government would have struggled with. But in addition to these structural challenges, the goal of establishing a revolutionary state and implementing revolutionary programs aimed at nothing less than the total transformation of society according to Marxist–Leninist principles was bound to run up against additional difficulties: how to determine friend from enemy, how to balance the need for a developed bureaucracy to manage a planned economy with the revolutionary impetus for continued close links to the people, and how to maintain revolutionary élan once the usual suspects had been rounded up and dispatched after 1953. It is clear that the leadership of the CCP deserved a fair share of the blame for how things unfolded in the later 1950s and after. But it is far from certain that the Party’s foibles (and its inability to control a larger domestic and international context) prove that socialism was doomed to fail in China – or that socialism was not the correct path to follow. Certainly, there were many within the CCP who were deeply committed to implementing what they understood to be socialism, and there were many more, likely the vast majority of the population of the PRC, who went along with these principles either because they were themselves convinced, because socialism gave them opportunities to rise in their careers or make claims on the state, or, more prosaically, because they had no choice in the matter.

Beyond the internal complexities of the 1950s, there was the larger issue of space in which the revolution was implemented. History – for the PRC as for anywhere – simultaneously plays out at different scales. Depending on sources, the research question, and personal bent, researchers tend to focus on very different slices of spatial reality. International theorists focus on international systems, those interested in state formation focus on the level of the central nation-state, those concerned with the emergence of social movements focus on the municipality or locality, those working on rural history or peasant resistance focus on the sub-county or village, and so on. Most of the historiography on the history of the PRC privileges the notion of China as a sovereign nation-state, and even many of the local studies we have revolve around central–local issues – either how central-government directives were implemented or deflected by local governments, or how individuals in particular localities experienced and adapted to the impact of those directives. Clearly, trends and events occurring at particular spatial scales reverberated well beyond their immediate domain. Most obviously, the rising tensions in Korea were both a cause and a consequence of deepening Cold War in a bipolar world and had a dramatic impact on China’s central government (what it could reasonably expect to push through in terms of land reform and anti-counterrevolutionary campaigns), and on a range of local governments, from those who were net suppliers of soldiers (e.g., Yunnan) to those who were net recipients of Korean War veterans (e.g., villages in north China).Footnote ¹⁶ But at present, there is still vanishingly little that integrates the different spatial levels in which the revolutionary PRC operated in its first decade.

For these reasons, we explicitly cover different scales of revolutionary transformation, from the most systemic of the macro to the smallest of the micro. Our first scale encompasses the global and the transnational. The bipolar global system so accurately sketched out by Weigelin-Schwiedrzik encompassed not only triangles and balancing but also China’s participation in two forms of transnationalism: the socialist ecumenical and the regional. The socialist world of the 1950s was a transnational system characterized by a commitment to principles of world socialism and fraternal assistance (Belogurova on coal, Shuman on transnational sport, and Johnson on transnational film in the East Asian and Southeast Asian region). But Shuman and Johnson’s chapters on sport and film also highlight how China interacted at two different transnational levels simultaneously: in a wider socialist ecumene, with an “inner” geography of sinophone and ethnic closeness in a quite different regional system.

Our next scale engages directly with the problems faced by the centralizing party-state as it attempted to grapple with a very significant problem of domestic governance: how to revolutionize society when its cadres were spread thin over a vast area inherited from a large agrarian empire. Although the subject matter is very different for each, Strauss on shifting modalities of bureaucracy and campaign, Murray on the central party-state’s insistence that women fighters in Hainan cede their positions to cadres sent down from the center, and Ruan on urban government bureaucratic classification of people it wanted to offload as “peasants” all point to the larger problem of the difficulty of governing a territory that was large, diverse, and resource-short. One shortcut was through posting and then implementing simplifying bureaucratic rules. Another, related, shortcut was to replace key cadres thought to be too sympathetic to “localist” concerns with those who would be more responsive to central dictates without arguing for undue sensitivity to messy local realities that confounded categories and suppositions already decided on from above.

Our final scale considers the local and the individual: how, within the constraints established by the system, local states and individuals enmeshed in local networks engaged in efforts to chart a path within new socialist structures of authority. Sometimes this led to great frustration on the part of idealistic cadres who wanted to imbibe recalcitrant subjects with the ideals of socialism (Zhang). Others directly engage how individuals quickly adapted to the language, forms, and institutions of socialism to press for everything from cleaner toilets (Smith) to more equitable grain rations (Jing). And, of course, the party-state’s language of grievance and oppression, in combination with its formula of investigation of cases, opened doors for individuals to pursue very local grievances (Jing).

Most of our chapters cover more than one of these scales. A few – notably Belogurova’s and Shuman’s – incorporate almost all of them. But even when they are not explicitly considered in a particular chapter, bringing together this evidence in one volume prompts us to begin to integrate these different scales of revolutionary transformation in surprisingly different ways: transnational socialism certainly provided both blueprints for action and immediate assistance and solidarity, but it didn’t prevent Chinese revolutionaries from shopping around for the best technology from the enemy capitalist West even as the selfsame Chinese revolutionaries claimed to be adapting technology to their local circumstances. Even as the Cold War in East Asia hardened some geographical boundaries as China restricted out-migration and direct contact between the mainland and Taiwan was shut down, questions of citizenship and belonging remained surprisingly porous in others, as when ethnically Chinese elite athletes who had never even been to China proper were invited to become national representatives of the People’s Republic.

Because we cover a wide range of topics, the range of the sources used by our authors is similarly wide-ranging: from personal diaries and interviews with family members to collections of letters, to the more familiar archives and publicly available documents. In a world in which archival access is increasingly restricted, in which semiprivate collections that were circulating entirely legally in the last decade are now suddenly off-limits, and in which scholars of PRC history within China must be increasingly guarded and careful, creativity with available sources inside and outside China is clearly the way forward.

Despite the wealth of work that has come out on the history of post-1949 China, we believe that there is still a need for ongoing discussions and new knowledge about this period. Blanke and Mühlhahn demonstrate how important the historiography of the CCP and the PRC continues to be, even as the Xi Jinping government continues to rewrite official narratives and follow a more authoritarian approach to alternative discourses and historiographies on the CCP history.

Of late, access to archives in China has become increasingly limited for Chinese and foreign scholars alike. To take but one example, in the well-used Shanghai Municipal Archive, any number of materials on “non-sensitive” subjects that were for years open and readily reproducible have become less available and at best only partially reproducible, and now in many cases are not accessible at all. This partial closing down has been replicated in universities, in which critical discourse on history has become increasingly sensitive and monitored. Unavoidably, not only will these trends change the way scholars can conduct research in China, but also this is going to change the way scholars are able to understand China. Many of the studies in this volume are based on archival materials collected and oral histories conducted when it was more possible to do so. But things are, at present, highly uncertain. We simply don’t know when, or even whether, it will be possible for the next generation of young scholars to work with the kinds of material that so many of the authors in this collection have been so fortunate in being able to have used. But we hypothesize that there are usually ways to work around obstacles, insurmountable though they might seem to be. There are collections in such venerable repositories as the Hoover Institution. Archives and collections in libraries or in private hands outside China remain untapped; careful use of gazetteers and wenshi ziliao still offers a wealth of concrete information about local histories. Retired scholars who collected materials that were at the time current events but are now in the process of being re-evaluated as history are often willing to pass them on. Those who work on Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Korea, or Japan might well have access to sources that are hiding in plain sight, and the archives of the GDR and other Soviet satellites are, to varying degrees, open to scholars.

We suspect that greater attention to the different scales of history, and to the ways in which these different levels are mutually constitutive, is the way forward. The revolutionary foundational 1950s cannot be understood apart from the Cold War, but at the same time, the very uncompromising nature of the revolutionary transformations of China in the 1950s reinforced the hardening of Cold War boundaries. At the outset of the 1950s, the hardening of those boundaries, China’s reasonable fear of invasion from abroad, and a popular wave of mass nationalism made its claims to necessarily rid the country of counterrevolutionaries, landlords, and class enemies plausible. The waves of campaigns in the early 1950s against counterrevolutionaries, landlords, private businesses, holdover officials, and unreconstructed intellectuals simultaneously removed any organized dampener on the CCP and extended the power of the party-state down to the level of the village. At the same time, we suggest that the so-called “Bamboo Curtain” remained porous in surprising ways. China’s impact on and engagement with the transnational did not cease in 1949. Indeed different scales of the transnational – from the socialist ecumene, to the region, to the Chinese ethnic diaspora – continued to shape, and be shaped by, revolutionary China in the 1950s.

The ways in which the transnational, the national (from central, to regional, to local), and the micro (family historical, autobiographical) were all recipients of and actors in the same swirl of revolutionary transformation represents one of the most promising avenues in which PRC history can move forward, and we hope that the next generation of scholarship will take on what we have only begun to explore here.