Political History: 1949–2012

The political history of post-1949 China covers a dramatic story that has seen the nation develop from one of the poorest to become an economic powerhouse and an increasingly influential global player. The history contains numerous twists and turns as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to find a suitable path for development. The initial flirtation with the Soviet model, which conflicted in some fundamental ways with the pre-1949 experiences, was dumped by the mid-1950s. Instead, the CCP launched its own path to development that led to economic and political chaos through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Finally, through the 1980s and beyond the CCP experimented with a variant of the kind of authoritarian politics combined with a guided market economy that has proven successful in other East Asian countries (see Amsden, 1989; Wade, 1990). China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the new century provided a huge economic boost and the CCP gained further confidence in its own development path following the global financial crisis of 2008–09. This chapter reviews first the framework of the debates and tensions within the revolutionary inheritance, how Mao Zedong and the CCP moved from triumph to disaster, from state-building to state destruction, and how the post-Mao leadership has wrestled with those legacies to maintain its grip on power and develop the economy.