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Communism vs capitalism, which is better
The revolution of china
Communism vs capitalism, which is better
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The Great Leap Forward In 1958 the Chinese communist party launched the Great Leap Forward campaign under the new "General Line for Socialist Construction." Mao promised the People's Republic that within fifteen years China would surpass Great Britain in the production of major products. Although evidence is sketchy, Mao's decision to initiate the Great Leap Forward was based in part on his concern about the Soviet policy of economic, financial, and technical assistance to China. The Great Leap Forward was aimed at accomplishing the economic and technical development of the country at a much faster pace and with greater results- much like a utopian society. The plan centered on a new socioeconomic and political system created in the countryside and in a few urban areas- the people's communes. It also set very high goals for increases in basic products such as iron and steel. These goals were unrealistic and the plan lacked sufficient planning, but initial results do show that China started making a great leap forward. The Chinese Communist Party called upon all Chinese to take on physical labor to transform the economy, forcing more than one hundred million people into projects. To encourage industry, small steel and iron-making furnaces were set up in the countryside. Large factories could not get enough of the raw materials they needed. Many problems made clear that the high goals made could not be accomplished. The communes, which were the size of towns, combined farmland and laborers of one whole district into a unit. The individual commune was placed in control of all production and was to operate as the sole unit; it was subdivided into the production brigade, and the production team. By the fall of 1958, about 750,000 agricultural producers' cooperatives, now designated as production brigades, had been amalgamated into about 23,500 communes, each averaging 22,000 people. About forty families constructed a production team, and about ten teams created a production brigade. Each brigade had certain jobs to do such as tree planting, operation of storage facilities, or transportation. Each commune was planned as a self-supporting community for agriculture, small-scale industry, schooling, marketing, administration, and local security, which was maintained by militia. Organized along paramilitary and laborsaving lines, the commune had communal kitchens, mess halls, and nurseries. By 1959, five hundred million people were working on twenty-six thousand communes.
Following the Chinese Revolution of 1949, China’s economy was in ruin. The new leader, Mao Zedong, was responsible for pulling the economy out of the economic depression. The problems he faced included the low gross domestic product, high inflation, high unemployment, and high prices on goods. In order to solve these issues, Mao sought to follow a more Marxist model, similar to that of the Soviet Union. This was to use government intervention to develop industry in China. In Jan Wong’s Red China Blues, discusses Maoism and how Mao’s policies changed China’s economy for the worse. While some of Mao’s early domestic policies had some positive effects on China’s economy, many of his later policies caused China’s economy to regress.
Zedong was supported in making the decision of what was known as the “Great Leap Forward”. This wild plan was aimed at making the people of China achieve economic advances in just a few years that would usually take other countries decades to accomplish. Zedong believed that in order to achieve his goals that steel production was necessary in his plans. Instead of working in areas that were not being used such as fields for example, above millions of peasants were forced to work on local deposits of iron ore and limestone, cutting down healthy trees to look for charcoal, and to have metal smelted. The result of this work did not go as planned. Steel was not produced. The only thing that was produced was pieces of brittle. These pieces of brittle were no use for even the simplest of tools. Peasants that were working on these sights were then ordered to abandon all private production in food which resulted in high reductions in
...e up with his Five Year Plan to try to create more of a world power by increasing China’s industry. At the beginning of the Revolution, China had been receiving money from the Soviet Union because they signed the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. This money allowed China to start to actually modernize its industries. Mao’s Five Year Plan’s main goal was to create better industry but also create more and better production of steel, coal, and iron. TO achieve these goals factories and mines were given specific goals to achieve and if they did not meet these goals, the factory believed they were failing its own people. Because of Mao’s Plan, the economic growth rose and most of the goals set were accomplished. The only problem was that the success of it was because there were a lot of Soviet Union advisers that helped China through the Plan.
The two-line struggle which broke between Mao Zedong’s promotion of socialism and his opponents’ lapsed into revisionism. The designation of Liu Shaoqi with the dominant authority was an assertion that consensus had diminished over a variety of issues, including the economy and ‘spontaneous developments towards capitalism’ in the countryside. The party was accused of having become ‘divorced from the masses’ and education thrived of ‘bourgeois individualism’. The struggle between the Soviet Union and China was escalating, in which a split seemed to be inevitable. Mao as a result attempted to spur China’s independent economic development through the Great Leap Forward. Hence the social violence of the Revolution was caused by the incoherence of pre-Cultural Revolution political system as explained by Richard Kraus, “Maoism itself was embodied in the paradox that Mao wanted people to act voluntarily exactly as he wanted them to, without quite trusting they would do so.” Shifting from this political argument, Lynn T. White III interpreted the Cultural Revolution as an unintended result of administrative policies, claiming the campaigning, controlling and labelling of such swayed students’ attitudes towards each other and their leaders, hence seen as merely the long term cost of these
The technological modernization for China occurred on May 4th, 1919 known as the May Fourth Movement. During this uprising, a group of Chinese students protested the Chinese government for their weak response to the Treaty of Versailles. At the same time the citizens were arguing to the government on how the Japanese are annexing parts of northern China. According to the Asian Literature Article, “China had a weak and unstable government, torn by internal dissent. There was much chaos and uncertainty about the country’s future. Chinas reputation was declining on the international scene.” (The Cultural Impact of the May Fourth Movement 2014) What the article is trying to say is that throughout the years after the movement the government was
This was a program which called for major steel production. Mao Zedong wanted to make China a “first-class modern power”(221). Mao wanted the steel production of the country to double in only one year, as he called on the whole population to help. All other work and schooling stopped. There was a new quota for each unit to produce.
...ral Revolution, Mao wished to eliminate the threat like the bourgeoisie thought, capitalism in the society. While in the Great Leap Forward, Mao wished to implement communism. For instance, building state-owned industrial economy, organize all peasants into agricultural cooperatives; establish people’s communes throughout China’s rural areas. All these are aim to build new socialist economic system through socialist transformation and nationalization of major industries and creating a Soviet-type centrally planned socialist economy.
Mao's period of communal reform and the establishment of the Communist party from 1949-1976 was needed in order for Deng's individual oriented, capitalist society to thrive. Mao's period encompassed the structure of a true dictatorial communist government. It strove to concentrate on unifying communities to create a strong political backbone while being economically self-sufficient and socially literate and educated in Maoist propaganda. Under Mao's leadership individual wealth was seen as a hindrance to community goals in meeting production quotas and was crushed by such policies as collectivization, land reformation, and movements such as The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Under his rule, modeled under the Stalinist USSR archetype, China raised its masses from poverty and starvation to a standard of living that was considered a substantial upgrade.
Communism brought economic improvements by producing more goods, as seen in “Building the New Society: The People’s Commune” (Strayer, 1082.) This image shows the effects of rapid industrialization and how the population was able to produce more goods to sell, ultimately boosting the economy. The result of rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union helped to build improvements in technology. In Joseph Stalin’s “The Result of the First Five-Year Plan” showcases the rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union. Stalin stated that they were able to produce an iron and steel industry, and they were able to develop goods like agricultural machinery, electric power, and various metals (Stalin, 1070.) Communism also improved the lives of millions of people in terms of security and overall health. The chart “China under Mao” shows the effects of communism in China under ruler Mao Zedong. This chart not only shows the overall population growing from 542 million to 1 billion people, but the average life expectancy jumps from 35 to 65 years (Strayer, 1049.) Another major advancement in communism was the idea of gender equality, meaning that both men and women could work together doing the same type of job. The image “Women, Nature, and Industrialization” shows a woman in China working alongside other men and doing a job similar to them.
The second major movement began in 1958 and lasted through 1959. It was the "Great Leap Forward." This movement was one of the most destructive to China. It was a movement that w...
The term, progress, is synonymous with phrases that denote moving forward, growth, and advancement. It seems unorthodox then that Ronald Wright asserts the world has fallen into a progress trap, a paradox to how progress is typically portrayed as it contradicts the conventional way life is viewed: as being a natural progression from the outdated and tried towards the new and improved. Wright posits that it is the world’s relentless creation of innovative methods that ironically contributes to the progress trap rather than to progress itself, the intended objective. Wright’s coinage of the term “progress trap” refers to the phenomenon of innovations that create new complications that are typically left without resolve which exacerbate current conditions; unwittingly then, matters would have been much better if the innovation had never been implemented. In his book, “A Short History of Progress,” he alludes to history by citing examples of past civilizations that collapsed after prospering, and ones that had longevity because they avoided the perilous progress trap. Wright recommends that societies of today should use indispensable resources, such as history, to learn and apply the reasons as to why certain societies succeeded, while also avoiding falling into the pitfalls of those that failed, the ones that experienced the progress trap. This can easily be interrelated with Godrej’s concept of “the overheated engine of human progress,” since humans for centuries have been risking environmental degradation for progress through ceaseless industrialization and manufacturing. This exchange is doomed to prevent improved progress and will lead to society’s inevitable decline since it is unquestionable that in the unforeseeable future, cl...
In China, the People’s Republic of China was the Chinese communist party headed by Chairman Mao Zedong. During his rule, Chairman Mao’s most famous event was his second “5 Year Plan” or better known as China’s Great Leap Forward in 1958. The Great Leap forward was similar to Russia’s 5 year plan as it had focused on focused on the countries heavy industry. The People’s Republic of China had put in price controlling regulations on the market, enforced a Chinese character simplification in order to increase the low literacy rates, and finally implement large-scale industrialization
Mao drove China into desperate poverty by crazed policies, such as the Cultural Revolution, which sought to suppress higher education in China. Fortunately, the Mao's rule had the positive effect of leveling the ground for the work which has followed. He did a very good job of breaking the link with China's past, and converting China into a large blank slate, upon which the next dictator could write what he wished. The next dictator, a pragmatist saw that Mao's China was poor and therefore weak. He was very impressed with Singapore as a model of development. Singapore, of course, is a rigidly authoritarian nation, whose government policy is devoted to developing business. Under the influence of this model Deng's China has poured vast resources into building roads, highways, electrical generating plants and other infrastructure needed for a modern economy. The general model has been to rigidly suppress political opinions, to build infrastructure (excessively in many cases leaving empty buildings) and to encourage the growth of export-oriented industry, which grows by a combination of low-wage Chinese labor and FDI especially technology (Meredith). ...
Social satisfaction often came from within the household, by working together and other rural-like amusements. Families often relied upon one another for both, economic and social support, and their communities played a role as well. They lived in small villages, either working in agriculture or as skilled craftsmen. Often everything was performed by hand. During the transition to industrial revolution living, new employment opportunities opened up for women, men and children alike. Families split apart, moved away, or engaged in work that other people of the same gender and age would themselves engage in. Enclosures laws required that grazing grounds be fenced in at the owner 's expense and as a result left many families bankrupt. Machines now capable of huge outputs made small hand weavers extinct. Working in a factory was the only choice which remained for many people. Harsh working conditions, reduced wages, longer working hours (up to 18 hours/day) left time for little to no family contact all of which contributed to the breakdown of traditional rural family values. . Furthermore, dwelling units were often shared with other
This century has been one of many changes and incredible inventions. If a person was to think about it, this century has taken us from horseback to fuel-injected horsepower, from gaslights to sodium-vapor streetlights, from crystal radios to digital television, from compasses to GPS navigation systems, from wood burning stoves to microwave ovens, from Victrolas to DVD players and of course from hot air balloons to jet propulsion aircraft.