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.

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 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 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.

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.