Billy Hamilton
Mao Joins Communism
Mao was born to some rich farmers in 1983. Rebelling against his parent’s ideas of deranged marriage, he attended the Human province’s first ordinary school in Chainsaw, where he met enlightened philosophers such as Kent and Rousseau. His philosophy teacher, Yang Gerbil, told him that their ideas could apply to China, and so sent him to live in the library at Peking University. The only two important people at this university, who were three people now that Mao was there, were Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhou. Before Mao came they had a Marxist study group, but now the real party got started.
One problem for the Marxists was that China could not have a working class because it had too many farms. Another issue for Mao was Chinese women. He wanted to improve them because they held up half the sky and a lot of their feet were still tied together. To overcome these problems, Mao built the China Model, a life-sized map of the country. In the Male Force Movement, Mao wrote a magazine with a new kind of communism in it, which later came to be known as Madism.
The Chinese Communist Party (CFC) only had four hundred members, which isn’t a lot in a place like China, so they joined the Go Ming Dang for the Northern Expedition. Concurrently, they staged peasant uprisings in the country and strikes out of the country. When the GMT’s son Yat San died, Chiang Kai-Sheik took over and everyone’s motives became indiscernible, but Moscow continued to cheer for cooperation. The communists tried it and lots of them were killed in the resulting white terror. The rest hid on the underground railway.
In 1927, Mao failed to bring in the autumn harvest and was booted to the Jiangxi region. Here he discovered the Soviet Union in China, rounded up gorillas for his red army, and took a 12 000 mile hike with the encirclement campaign snapping at his heels. This was called the Long March because that is the month it happened in. Its purpose was to protect the communists from the corrosive ideas of the KMD, who couldn’t keep up because they were already into heavy machinery. The Long March was when communism really took flight in China. It later landed in Yan’an.
During the resulting decade, Mao didn’t carry out full land confiscation because he didn’t want to alienate the landowners—yet. Mao was in charge because of the Zunyi Conferment. He also brought in policies of women and children, which helped swell the ranks of the CPC. When the Japanese invaded Manchukuo, Mao called for the United Front so as to look like he cared.
The Civil War broke out in 1945 to 1949 and the communists won for every reason. They were very good at preserving their own troops and making the nationalists look like Westerners. It also helped that they sort of knew what they were doing. Chiang Kai Check on the other hand faced internal problems such as unemployment, inflation, strikes, and the CCP. He could hold onto the cities but not the countries. In the end, the nationalists seized all China’s artifacts and fled to Formosa. Their remains were recognizable by the U.N. for about thirty years.
Changes in Mao’s China
The Chinese people stood up and surveyed the devastation. One problem was that the economy had been carried away by the Russians. Another was that all the money had fled to Taiwan. On top of this, the peasants were still starving, the population was still growing, and the landlords were still owning.
To solve these problems, Mao ordered the people to kill the rats and rewarded them with the red flag incentive program. The Marriage Reformation Law of 1950 made arranged marriage and polygamy immoral but divorce became a good thing. Throughout China all the beggars just sort of disappeared. Mao’s supporters grew, while his opponents was tracked down and destroyed by the secret police.
The communist government dropped in a central planet economy, fixed all the broken prices, and robbed all the banks. Some businesses were not taken over by the government because it was important that they keep working, but all the rest had their heads chopped off and replaced with photos of Mao’s. The Agrarian Reform Law divided up land among the pheasants, while the landowners were put on trial or executed. However, some rich peasants remained, who grew increasingly kulakky. The Three Ants Campaign of 1951 and the Five Ants Campaign of 1952 made eight ants in all, rooting out the last vestigetables of capitalism in China. Mao now had more control of the country than anyone in the last fifty years, which isn’t saying much.
Mao’s political policies were intended to restore stability or at least create some synthetic substitute. A new system was implemented where people were allowed to vote, but Mao’s enemies couldn’t because they weren’t really people. There were fourteen political parties and Mao ran them all. Just to be on the safe side, he later abolished them. The communist party also repainted the flag, remixed the media, renamed the streets, redesigned the education system, and made China beautiful by putting up pictures of Mao everywhere. People were forced to go to meetings where the changes were explained and they were allowed to feel proud.
People in China were very frightened by Taiwan, because if the United States were to attack China, whether during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any other hour of the night, they would use Taiwan as a stepping-stone or as a pincer. Taiwan was also very important to the United States because of its dominoes. Hong Kong, on the other hand, was still British, so Mao knew it wouldn’t pose any threat and let it be.
All these policies were part of Madism, which was evolving into a sort of communist sadism. At first Mao pursued Madist ideas dogmatically, but later grew more realistic and idealistic. His vision of continuing revolution was faithfully enacted but didn’t have very good results in terms of stability.
Cooperation Can Kill You
Stalin wished to provide aid to China because cooperation between socialist countries was an important step towards building peace, squashing the United States, and taking over the world. Mao wished China to follow the Soviet model because that was what had allowed Russia to jump from meagre to mighty at such an extraordinary pace. Thus it was only reasonable that the two countries should sign the Treaty of Eternal Friendliness Forever in 1950. It didn’t work out.
Russia sent approximately 300 000 000 expert scientists and 10 000 dollars to help with China’s first fifty-year plan. The aim of the plan was to build heavy industry A.S.A.P. because advanced economic theory (i.e. Marx) had shown that true communism was possible only in a fully industrialized country. New iron and coal stockpiles were found in China, banishing fears of running out of inhuman resources, but money remained scarce. Things would grow especially sticky later, when the Russians saw China’s failure and asked for their money back.
By building industriously in smaller centres, the Chinese were supposedly able to reach almost all their plan targets by the end of five years, although all the numbers are automatically lies because they were written by communists. Certain towns that made extraordinary progress were commemorated by having models made of them.
Improvements were also made to the educational and transformational systems, but the agricultural system remained swamped in inefficiency. Land renovation had given the land to the pheasants, who ate almost everything it produced. This was a problem because people in the cities sometimes needed food as well. The first attempt to approve agricultural input was the creation of Mutant Aid Teams (MATs), where all labour and equipment was put into one pool, but this was abandoned as un-communist because one’s contribution affected one’s reward.
Next the Communist Party tried telling everyone what to do, which was weird because those guys were all Russians. In fact, Soviet cooperation was the only thing that made the Fifty-Year Plan possible, so it would have been horrible if the friendship went suddenly foul, which it soon did.
In 1957, the government began encouraging peasants to form Aggravational Production Cooperatives (APCs). These were intended to take advantage of modern methods such as large-scale farming and land fabrication. By 1956, over ninety percent of the population was cooperative. This was terrible because in China cooperation can kill you. Between cooperation and crumby weather, agricultural output rose by only 25 times by the end of the plan while industrious output rose by 120 times, so, for every 25 people who were fed, 95 others starved to death.
Cooperation also made the people mad because it unreformed the land reparations, but Madism was still yet to reach its maddest.
The Great Leap Forward
The relationship between China and the USSR reached its peak when they fought each other in the Korean War. After Khrushchev died, he attacked Stalin at the 1956 Congress Party and killed him. Mao felt very hurt because he saw this as an attack on everything he stood for, and decided to show once and for all that Khrushchev was wrong and communism was right.
In February and May of 1956, Mao planted a hundred flowers, but before they could bloom they were trampled to death by crowds of protesters who were displeased with his dictatorial rulership. Enraged, he had everyone involved re-educated, demoted, fired, arrested, imprisoned, punished, and stripped of their red flags. Because his attempts to create beauty had failed, Mao contorted to an even more extreme political position.
His new plan was the Great Leap but it wasn’t forward. It was to be leaped entirely without Soviet helpers, in order to build industry and team spirit.
In one new policy, called communication, the villages were bulldozed and farmers were put into communes, which are like communities but smaller. Communication made the peasants thirty times as big as cooperation had. The communes were divided into 600 person-brigades, which were each in turns made up of 200 person-teams. All the, land, animals, people, and other means of production had to be turned over to the government. People were stored in barracks and eaten in canteens to maximize efficiency.
The greatest successes were Motel Communes such as Dazhai, which were a big sham put on for the tourists. Hopes of industrial development were soon burned up in the backyard furnaces, which spit out useless iron pigs. The Great Leapfrog also caused unthinkable ecological damage, including the deforestation of China’s water tables. Questionable farming methods, which went against science and common sense, made the land basically worth dirt. Because the communists were cheats and liars, they still claimed to have met all their quotients when they hadn’t, and these lies bounced back into even stupider orders and quotients.
After the Great Leap, gravity kicked in and China crashed down to earth. Some of Mao’s cronies had tried to warn him that this would happen, but he just wasn’t one to listen. The human cost was enormous, although the monetary cost was very cheap. A lot of people had no food and so some of them starved. Nobody has ever counted them all, but the dead numbered somewhere between 10 000 000 and 100 000 000.
The only food in China came from Canada and Australia by ship. Mao was outraged with Khrushchev for allowing this kind of cooperation with capitalists, who he called paper tigers because of their dependence on anatomic weaponry. In response, he demanded that the Russians give him nuclear bombs. They gave him the plans but told him not to make any because of the new Nuclear Non-Profile Rational Treaty with the United States. China made bombs anyhow and the Russians went red with rage, but the Chinese went even redder. All the Soviet advisors went storming back to Russia and China was left alone with its failed Leap. In a last attempt to make Russia come over to his side, Mao tried shelling Taiwanese islands, but for some reason it didn’t help.
Finally, fed up with Russia’s willingness to cooperate with capitalists, China rebounded like a ping-pong ball over to the Americans for help. Nixon created the China Card, which allowed China entrance to the United Nations Security Council. This was actually a problem because later the Chinese would use their Velcro to tie up everyone’s hands.
The (Evil) Cultural Revolution
The Chinese government kicked out Mao for ruining everything, but he got to keep his chair. Now that he was no longer in politics he wrote a sequel to the Great Leap Forward called the Red Book, which was actually a re-publication of everything he’d been saying for years. Lynne Biao, who ran the army, took away all the soldiers’ ranks and gave them copies of the Red Book instead. There was nobody to stop him because all the smart people had been imprisoned by the Hundred Moving Flowers.
Taking after McCarthy, Mao gave a speech warning that the government was infested with un-communist communists. A great political conflict was fought on Revolutionary Road over China’s future. Mao wanted the people to become inflamed with communism so they wouldn’t start acting like Russians. It was also important that the people be loyal and patriotic in case Vietnam started to spread into China. Mao called for a moral uprising of the Chinese to defeat capitalism and traditionalism, but he was too late and so ultimately the capitalists won.
Even though he wasn’t supposed to be in charge, Mao fired the leaders of the country and closed all the schools. The indebted students swore him their allegiance and beat up their teachers. When they couldn’t find any more teachers they went after everyone else, and then later when they couldn’t find anyone else they went after each other. The rampaging students annihilated all of China’s culture and broke into houses looking for anyone practicing feudalism, capitalism, medicine, or law. Capitalist road-builders were executed, tried, and sent to jail. Red Gourds, a type of homemade explosive, destroyed churches, artwork, temples, books, and the economy. A million people died during the years of the Cultural Revolution, all of them in China.
The cultured revolutionaries fought ceaselessly over which of them was most loyal to Mao, but none of them would listen when he told them to stop breaking the country. This was because of Mao’s wife, who was named after the hated Qing dinosaur. Finally, Mao made everyone drop what they were destroying, go out to the countryside, learn about their peasant routes, and teach the peasants about Madism. By this time, though, most people had already figured out how mad Madism was.
Mao’s top henchman, Joe Enlai, supported rightist elephants such as the Dang Xiao Ping (a replacement for the earlier Giao Ming Dang). Opposing him were leftist elephants such as the Group Four Project led by Mrs. Mao Qing. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, Mao and Joe were both very sick old men. Lynne Biao was to take over but he was in the army so Mao had his plane assassinated on Russian orders. Duo Gofang, next in line for leadership, remained very inoffensive thereafter.
In 1976, Joe invented four modern ideas called science, industry, defence, and farming, but just at that moment he died. A festival called Qingming was held in honour of people who had died in Tienanmen Square. It went awry and the Dang Xiao Ping had to be decommissioned to make people stop chanting and piling up wreaths. About the only person who hadn’t had enough of communism was Mao.
China After Mao
On September 9th, 1978, Mao’s life support was unplugged and he passed away. Hoo Gofang came into power, but the Group Four Project didn’t notice him and though they were in charge. Hoo Gofang denounced them at Mao’s funeral. Later he had them arrested because they were plotting Mao’s murder. They were also blamed for the Cultural Revolution, which in hindsight hadn’t been a very good idea. It was actually Mao’s fault but they couldn’t take it out on him because he was already dead.
Now that he had eliminated Mrs. Qing and the Group Four Project, Hoo disappeared and Dang Xiao Ping became the leader. He was a person and not a political organization like the Giao Ming Dang. This Dang was more popular than other recent leaders because he wasn’t mad. Also, he didn’t look like Mao, and most people were finally noticing that Mao had been involved in every bad thing that had ever happened.
The four modernizations invented by Joe Enlai formed the apple core of Dang’s policy. To be different, he made a ten-year plan to establish quotas and decree how much money they would require. The people were encouraged with the Household Responsibility Program, under which their workload was expressed as exact quotations instead of as percentiles. China’s farmers were replaced with mechanical ones. Real industry was encouraged to produce useful iron and steel medals. New regulations were introduced to control quality, so that China could take over as the main source of the world’s clothing and plastic dinosaurs. The Chinese also began to use science and technology, which had been shunned as un-communist during the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution.
To finance all this, the government reintroduced the Open Door Policy and the Treaty Ports, although this time they weren’t all on the coast. Dang encouraged people to travel around the world and bring things back to China. They complied but also brought back foreign concepts such as freedom and democracy.
In 1989, thousands of protestors gathered in Tienanmen Square, where they complained about the way things were being run. The Chinese people had been inspired by the Russian Paratroopers and Glasnost and hoped that because things were improving in the rest of the world they would in China as well. Dang had brought in economic changes, but he remained committed to the normal Communist political ideology of despotism. On June 3rd, tanks and machine guns rolled into the square and a shocking masquerade occurred.
China’s incessantly growing population led to increases in supply and demand, especially the latter for food. There were also environmental issues but the communists didn’t care about that. In 1908 China introduced the One-Child Police, who only allowed one child per village. This still allowed people to get away with multiple children if they lived on farms. Soon a host of exceptions led to a host of infants.
Where the policy did work, it caused infringements into people’s privacy. To overcome this, parents drowned their daughters until they could get a son. Although this act was banned in Mao’s Marriage Reformation Act, nobody listened to his ideas any more and so infanticide grew more and more prevalent as a means of family planning. In China today, a country with a population over one zillion, there are about 120 boys for every 100 girls. That’s a lot of unhappy people.