It was a liberation that plunged the country into decades of Maoist cruelty and chaos.

The People’s Republic of China Was Born in Chains

The Communist Party calls 1949 a liberation. But China was far freer beforehand.

On Oct. 1, 2019, the Chinese Communist Party will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, an event referred to by the government as a liberation.

It was a liberation that plunged the country into decades of Maoist cruelty and chaos.

China today, for any visitor who remembers the country from 20 or 30 years ago, seems hardly recognizable. 

One of the government’s greatest accomplishments is to have distanced itself so successfully from the Mao era that it seems almost erased. 

Instead of collective poverty and marching Red Guards, there are skyscrapers, new airports, highways, railway stations, and bullet trains. 

Yet scratch the glimmering surface and the iron underpinnings of the one-party state become apparent.

They have barely changed since 1949, despite all the talk about “reform and opening up.” The legacy of liberation is a country still in chains.

Just what was China liberated from in 1949? It wasn’t the Japanese, defeated four years earlier by the Allies, including the Nationalists and their leader, Chiang Kai-shek. 

It wasn’t colonialism—all the foreign concessions in the country had been dissolved, some as early as 1929.

The Republic of China was a sovereign state and a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.

Nor was it tyranny. In 1912, when China became Asia’s first republic, it had an electorate of 40 million people, or 10 percent of the population, a level of popular representation not reached by Japan until 1928 and India until 1935. 

Participatory politics, despite many setbacks, continued to thrive over the following decades. 

When the National Assembly met in May 1948, upwards of 1,400 delegates from all parts of China adopted a constitution that contained an elaborate bill of rights.

In many parts of Asia, the Republic of China was seen as a beacon of democracy, not least because of its sustained efforts to separate powers and establish an independent judicial system and promote the rule of law. 

Freedom of speech may have been curtailed by local strongmen, but Ta Kung Pao, China’s most important newspaper before 1949, regularly lambasted Chiang.

Freedom of association was vigorously defended and led to a thriving civil society, with endless associations set up independently from the government, from imposing chambers of commerce to student unions.

China, before 1949, was more closely integrated into the global community than it is now. 

Several bilingual lawyers became judges at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, while educated professionals were able to match their foreign peers in many other fields, ranging from avionics to zoology.

But ordinary people, too, were familiar with the world beyond their community, as illustrated magazines and radio programs disseminated information about every aspect of the modern world, whether new agricultural techniques or the fluctuating price of silk on the international market. Freedom of religion was taken for granted.

The term “liberation” brings to mind cheering crowds celebrating newly won freedoms, but what happened in 1949 was the result of a long and bloody military conquest. 

After 1945, the Americans abandoned their wartime ally Chiang and the Nationalists, while Joseph Stalin occupied Manchuria and helped Mao Zedong turn his ragtag army of guerrilla fighters into a formidable war machine.

By 1948, the Communists began to lay siege to one city after another, starving them into surrender. 

Changchun, in the middle of the vast Manchurian plain north of the Great Wall of China, was blockaded for five months in 1948. 

The city fell after 160,000 civilians died of hunger. Unwilling to undergo the same fate, other cities capitulated soon afterward. 

By the end of 1949, the red flag was raised over the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Over the following years, a newly conquered public had to turn themselves into what the Communists called “New People.”

 They went to reeducation centers to learn the right answers, the right ideas, and the right slogans. 

Many of those deemed beyond redemption were slaughtered in an initial Great Terror that claimed some 2 million lives between 1949 and 1952, as victims were shot in public rallies held in stadiums or executed far away from the public eye, along rivers and ravines.

In a meticulously drafted report preserved in the vaults of the Communist Party archives, Public Security Minister Luo Ruiqing proudly announced in August 1952 to Mao that 301,800 people had been executed in one year in a mere six provinces.

All organizations operating outside of the party—religious communities, charitable organizations, study societies, independent chambers of commerce, civil associations—were eliminated within a few years. 

By 1956, all private enterprises had been expropriated. In the countryside, the land was collectivized.

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