IB History Mao: How Did Authoritarian Rule Affect People's Lives? Key Definitions

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

A national revolt against Chinese rule in Tibet, triggered partly by fears for the Dalai Lama's safety and worsened by famine caused by Mao's agricultural reforms; it was crushed by the People's Liberation Army, after which the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India.