IB History China: Mao Key Definitions

A mass political campaign launched by Mao Zedong in response to criticism expressed during the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956–1957). When intellectuals, academics, and party members used the invitation to "let a hundred flowers bloom" to criticise the CCP's policies, Mao abruptly reversed course. An estimated 550,000 people were labelled "rightists", losing their jobs, being sent to labour camps, or suffering public denunciation. The campaign effectively silenced intellectual dissent in China for decades.

A system of government where power is concentrated in a single leader or small group, with limited political freedoms, restricted media, and little accountability to the population. In Egypt, authoritarian rule persisted from the 1952 Free Officers' coup through Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, and was restored under el-Sisi after 2013.

Rural health workers given basic medical training from the late 1960s onward to bring healthcare to areas with no doctors, part of Mao's wider effort to extend welfare provision into the countryside.

A system introduced under Mao that formally classified every Chinese family according to its pre-1949 economic and social status, such as landlord, rich peasant, or poor peasant, determining access to education, employment, and political rights, often for generations.

An agricultural policy in which private farms are combined into large state-controlled or cooperative farms. In Vietnam, collectivization was imposed on the south after 1975, eliminating private land ownership and requiring farmers to work collectively under government direction.

A decade-long campaign launched by Mao in 1966 to purge the Communist Party of perceived counter-revolutionaries and reassert his own authority after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. It mobilised millions of Red Guards to attack the "Four Olds", closed schools and universities, and caused widespread social and political chaos until Mao's death in 1976.

A Chinese policy that sent millions of urban youth, especially during the Cultural Revolution, to live and work in rural areas, officially to learn from the peasantry.

China's first major economic planning program, modelled on Soviet central planning. It prioritised heavy industry (steel, coal, machinery) over agriculture and consumer goods, following Soviet advice and with substantial Soviet technical assistance. The First Five-Year Plan achieved strong industrial growth — steel output more than tripled — but the emphasis on heavy industry at the expense of agriculture laid the groundwork for the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward.

The Gang of Four were four senior Communist Party officials (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Yao Wenyuan) who were arrested in October 1976, one month after Mao Zedong's death. They were held responsible for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, was the most prominent. They were convicted at a televised trial in 1980-81. Their arrest ended the Cultural Revolution period and opened the way for Deng Xiaoping's reforms.

Mao's second Five-Year Plan, aiming to rapidly transform China into a modern industrial power through mass collectivisation and backyard steel production. It caused catastrophic economic disruption and a famine that killed an estimated tens of millions of people.

The Chinese Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek from the late 1920s, which ruled the Republic of China and fought the CCP in the Chinese Civil War before its defeat and retreat to Taiwan in 1949.

China's household registration system, introduced in 1958, which ties citizens' access to public services (schools, hospitals, welfare benefits) to their registered place of birth. Citizens registered as rural residents who migrate to cities receive only limited access to urban public services, creating a two-tier system. As of 2020, an estimated 290 million "floating population" migrants lived in cities without full urban hukou status, unable to access healthcare, education, or social security benefits on equal terms with registered urban residents.

Mao's 1956-1957 invitation for intellectuals to openly criticize the Communist Party. When criticism proved sharper than expected, Mao reversed course with the Anti-Rightist Campaign, persecuting over 500,000 people.

The catastrophic collapse in the value of Guomindang currency during the Chinese Civil War era, driven by war spending and government mismanagement, which destroyed the savings of China's urban middle class and undermined public support for Chiang Kai-shek's government.

The system of forced labour camps in China, used to detain and "re-educate" political prisoners, criminals, and class enemies. Estimates suggest millions passed through the laogai system under Mao.

The common name for Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, a compilation of Mao's sayings distributed in hundreds of millions of copies, especially during the Cultural Revolution, as a central tool of propaganda and the cult of personality.

The 9,000 km retreat of the Chinese Communist Party (1934-1935) from Jiangxi to Yan'an to escape Nationalist encirclement. Of roughly 80,000 who started, only about 8,000 survived. It became a founding myth of the CCP.

The PRC's first major social reform, which abolished arranged marriage, concubinage, and dowry payments, permitted divorce, and required all marriages to be registered with the state.

A CCP policy of maintaining close contact with the broad mass of the people. Party cadres were expected to gather ideas from the masses, interpret them through Marxist theory, and return them as policy.

A 1919 student protest movement against the Treaty of Versailles and foreign imperialism in China. It promoted science, democracy, and vernacular Chinese, and influenced the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

Mao's transitional political and economic programme of the 1940s and early 1950s, combining a multi-class coalition government, controlled capitalism, and land reform as a preparatory stage before China moved toward full socialism.

Large collective units combining farming, small-scale industry, and local administration, formed by merging agricultural cooperatives from 1958 onward as part of the Great Leap Forward; they ended private land ownership entirely.

Ping-pong diplomacy refers to the use of table tennis exchanges to facilitate the rapprochement between the United States and the People's Republic of China in 1971. A US table tennis team competing in Japan was invited to China, becoming the first Americans officially hosted in the PRC since 1949. The exchanges led to Henry Kissinger's secret visit to Beijing in July 1971 and President Nixon's historic visit to China in February 1972.

Youth paramilitary groups mobilised by Mao during the Cultural Revolution to attack perceived class enemies, traditional culture, and Party officials accused of insufficient revolutionary zeal, often through public humiliation and violence.