IB History Economic and Social Transformations and Challenges Under Mao Key Definitions

The successive stages of collectivisation in rural China between 1952 and 1958. The first stage (Mutual Aid Teams) involved shared tools and labour; the second (Lower APCs) partially pooled land ownership; the third (Higher APCs) fully pooled land into collective farms. By 1956, virtually all of China's rural population had been collectivised into Higher APCs. The APCs were then merged into the larger People's Communes during the Great Leap Forward in 1958.

A mass organisation established by the CCP in 1949 to mobilise women in support of CCP policies and to promote women's rights within the framework of socialist construction. The Federation campaigned for implementation of the Marriage Law, ran literacy programs for women, and recruited women into the workforce. It served simultaneously as a vehicle for genuine women's empowerment and as a CCP-controlled organisation that constrained independent feminist activism.

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.

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.

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.

A target of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976): old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Red Guards were mobilised to destroy the Four Olds, leading to the ransacking of temples, churches, historic sites, and private homes; the burning of books and religious texts; and the public humiliation and physical assault of teachers, scholars, and religious figures. The campaign caused enormous and irreversible destruction of China's cultural heritage.

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 Land Reform Movement was a nationwide campaign in which the Chinese Communist Party redistributed land from landlords and wealthy peasants to poor and landless peasants. Between 1950 and 1952, approximately 43% of China's agricultural land was redistributed to 300 million peasants. The campaign was accompanied by mass "struggle sessions" in which landlords were publicly accused and humiliated. An estimated 1-2 million landlords were executed, and up to 5 million were sent to labour camps.

The Marriage Law of 1950 was one of the first laws promulgated by the People's Republic of China. It abolished arranged marriages, child betrothal, concubinage, and the purchase of wives. It established the legal equality of men and women in marriage, required mutual consent, set minimum ages for marriage, and gave women equal rights to divorce and to hold property. Implementation was uneven, particularly in rural areas, but the law fundamentally altered the legal framework of gender relations in China.

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.

Under the Sino-Soviet alliance, the USSR provided China with approximately 156 major industrial projects, around 10,000 Soviet technical advisers, and thousands of Chinese students trained in Soviet universities and factories during the 1950s. Soviet assistance was critical to the First Five-Year Plan's success in building steel mills, machinery plants, and military-industrial facilities. When the USSR withdrew its advisers in 1960 during the Sino-Soviet split, many projects were left incomplete, causing significant industrial disruption.