Consolidating power

Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949, ending decades of war and civil war. The new regime moved quickly to secure control:

• Terror and consolidation: campaigns against 'counter-revolutionaries', and China's entry into the Korean War (from 1950), rallied the nation and crushed opposition.
• Land reform (1950-52): landlords were denounced at mass 'struggle meetings' and their land redistributed to poor peasants. It won peasant support but was extremely violent, with very large numbers of landlords killed.
• Social change: the Marriage Law (1950) banned arranged marriage and concubinage and granted women new rights - one of the regime's most far-reaching reforms.
• Planning: the First Five-Year Plan (1953-57), modelled on the USSR, prioritised heavy industry, while agriculture was gradually collectivised.

Winning the peasants

Invitation and trap

In 1956-57 Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign, encouraging intellectuals to speak freely: 'let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend'.

• The volume and sharpness of the criticism that followed alarmed the leadership.
• Mao reversed course with the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957), in which hundreds of thousands of critics were denounced, silenced, imprisoned or sent to labour camps.

Debate to note: was the Hundred Flowers a genuine liberalisation that Mao then abandoned in alarm, or a deliberate trap to lure critics into the open? Historians disagree - and this is exactly the sort of question a Section B essay can turn on.

After the flowers

The Great Leap Forward and the famine

In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward to overtake the West by mass mobilisation:

• Peasants were herded into vast people's communes; households were pushed to produce steel in 'backyard furnaces', much of it useless.
• Local officials, terrified of Mao, reported wildly inflated harvests; the state requisitioned grain against these fantasy figures.
• The result was the Great Famine (1959-61), one of the deadliest in history, with tens of millions of deaths.
• At the Lushan Conference (1959), Marshal Peng Dehuai criticised the policy and was purged. Only afterwards did more pragmatic leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping steer a partial recovery.

Which phase of Maoist China?

Tap an event, then the period it belongs to.

The Cultural Revolution

Sidelined after the famine, Mao struck back. From 1966 he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to purge 'capitalist roaders' and reassert his dominance:

• He mobilised millions of young Red Guards, armed with the Little Red Book of his quotations, to attack the 'Four Olds' - old ideas, culture, customs and habits.
• Teachers, officials and 'class enemies' were humiliated, beaten or killed. The head of state Liu Shaoqi was purged and died in detention (1969). Society and the economy were thrown into chaos.
• Mao's chosen successor Lin Biao died in a plane crash in 1971 after an alleged plot. In Mao's final years the radical Gang of Four, led by his wife Jiang Qing, held great power.
• Mao died on 9 September 1976; within weeks the Gang of Four were arrested (October 1976), ending the Cultural Revolution.

The engine of the Cultural Revolution

Campaign to description

Tap a description on the left, then the campaign or group it names.

Judging Mao's China

Although Paper 2 examines sources, your essays are stronger when you know how historians assess Mao:

Frank Dikotter, in Mao's Great Famine (2010), used newly opened Chinese archives to argue the Great Leap Forward killed at least tens of millions and to place responsibility squarely on Mao. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), offered a relentlessly hostile portrait of Mao as a monster driven by personal power. Other historians, while acknowledging the catastrophes, set them against real gains in literacy, life expectancy, women's rights and industrial capacity, and warn against reducing the whole era to a single verdict.

Exam skill: when a source praises or condemns a policy, weigh it against what you know - the famine death toll, the recovery of the early 1960s, the chaos of 1966-76 - and reach a supported judgement.

The cost of the Great Leap

Build the spine of the option

Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.

How Paper 2 is assessed

Edexcel Paper 2 (Option 2E.1): 1 hour 30 minutes, 40 marks, 20% of the A-level. It is a depth study.

• Section A (AO2): a compulsory question analysing two primary sources - how far a historian could use them for a given enquiry, judged on provenance, content and context.
• Section B (AO1): one essay chosen from two, testing depth understanding.

Note: at Edexcel, historians' interpretations (AO3) are examined in Paper 1 and the Coursework - not in the depth study. Here your job is to weigh primary sources and argue a depth judgement.

The end of the Mao era

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now have the arc of option 2E.1 and the debates around it. Press Finish to see your score.