Summary

The CCP did not just want to reform industry and agriculture – it wanted to reform completely the whole of Chinese society and introduce a Communist way of life.  Immediately, therefore, the Communists passed laws to:
•  transform the lives of women,
•  improve health,
•  improve education,
•  destroy religion, and
•  destroy traditional culture (he put his wife, Jiang Qing, in charge of this).

Baby girls were sometimes killed or abandoned (the Communists banned this)

Before the age of 7, many upper-class girls’ toes were broken and their feet bound, to keep their feet small; this was regarded as beautiful, but it also restricted movement and freedom (the Communists banned this)

Child-marriage was still common, and helped ensure that husbands dominated their wives (the Communists banned this)

Girls could be sold as servants, concubines or prostitutes (the Communists banned this)

Mao Zedong declared that 'women hold up half the sky'.  The Marriage Law abolished the supremacy of man over woman, and also concubinage and child-marriage. It allowed a wife to divorce her husband, but forbade a husband to divorce his wife if she had a child less than one year old.

In the communes, women were regarded as equal to men, and had to work like men; their children were put in creches so they could work, but this damaged their role as a mother

The CCP actively tried to destroy the family; in some communes men and women lived in single-sex barracks.

So many women asked for a divorce that Party officials started refusing permission, despite a re-issuing of the Marriage Law in 1953

Under the pressure of the Famine of 1959-61, women lost many of the social advances they had made; men sold their wives to be servants, and their daughters as prostitutes

Teams of cadres went into the villages explaining the connection between dirt and disease, and how to avoid dysentery and malaria (e.g. the ‘Four Pests’ campaigns – flies, mosquitoes, bed bugs, rats)

A million people were given 6-months basic medical training and sent out into the villages to provide basic medical care free of charge; their most effective improvement was inoculation

Poppy fields were burned, and addicts killed or forced to reform cold turkey; their families were made responsible for their future good behaviour

Under the Great Leap Forward, the commune was supposed to provide medical and hospital facilities; mostly this proved impossible

During the Cultural Revolution, properly trained doctors were despised, and forced to show solidarity with the workers by mopping the hospital floors, in order they might learn the dignity of labour; this actually reduced the standard of medical care in China

A national system of Primary education was set up; the literacy rate, 20% in 1949, was 70% by 1976

To help with communication and writing, the government introduced a phonetic form of Mandarin called pinyin; this greatly eased the learning of Mandarin

Officially, education was free and for both boys and girls; unofficially, parents ended up paying for books, pens and paper, and even helping towards the teachers’ salaries, and many more girls dropped out of education than boys

Education beyond the basic was despised; a survey in 1982 found that only a quarter of the working population had been to school beyond the age of 12, and only 1% had a degree. Even among the party leaders, only 6% had been educated beyond the age of 16

The Red Guards of the cultural revolution despised education – 130 million of them left school and rejected learning as ‘bourgeois and reactionary’

Propagandists were loyal Party members charged with spreading the latest Party message; mainly they put up wall posters, but propaganda also blared out of loudspeakers, in the newspapers and in films

Ordinary people would be made to attend one or two meetings a week, people needing ‘re-education’ would have to go to more; they would listen to lectures, and be asked to denounce their neighbours

See that section

See that section

Including Tiananmen Square – many of Beijing’s ancient houses and structures were pulled down and replaced by Soviet Realism concrete eyesores

Mao said religion was as bad as Nazism, and had to be eradicated; during the Cultural Revolution it was denounced as one of the ‘Four Olds’

Churches were destroyed, priests and monks mocked and beaten – ancestor worship was condemned as a superstition

Some churches were allowed to remain to give the appearance of toleration, but they had to preach communism

In Tibet, the government feared the mixture of Buddhism and nationalism, and embarked on a campaign of religious persecution and genocide

In Xinjiang, the government feared the mixture of Islam and nationalism, conquered the area in a military campaign, and settled huge numbers of Chinese immigrants in the region to try to counter the local population

Mao believed that the Communist revolution should brutally overthrow every aspect of the past, and he put his wife in charge as ‘the cultural purifier of the nation’

The government banned traditional songs and dances, festivals and wandering poets; instead, children were made to chant communist slogans

These troupes toured the countryside giving long performances of politically correct propaganda, sometimes films

All traditional and western culture was banned, only politically-correct proletarian culture was allowed, which furthered communist ideals

Musicians, authors etc had to conform, or they were persecuted and sent for re-education; many gave up or committed suicide – culture died