During the 1959 Lushan Conference, Peng Dehuai wrote to Mao Zedong criticizing the Great Leap Forward; after Mao's speech on July 23, the conference's theme shifted from correcting the "Left" to opposing rightist opportunism.
At the Lushan Conference, Liu Shaoqi brought up old accounts against Peng Dehuai, supported the resolution to overthrow the Peng Dehuai anti-party clique, and subsequently signed the dismissal order in his capacity as Chairman of the State.
In July 1959, the CCP Central Committee convened the Lushan Conference, after which China's political campaigns and economic policies shifted further.
During the Great Famine disaster, Deng Xiaoping was accused of intentionally breaking his leg while playing billiards to evade political responsibility.
Liu Shaoqi was officially elected President of the People's Republic of China in April 1959, reaching the peak of his political career.
Around 1959, Mao Zedong publicly advocated a Cao Cao-style power scheme; the relevant remarks are regarded as a historical footnote to his views on political maneuvering.
A nationwide famine struck China between 1959 and 1961, with various estimates putting the number of abnormal deaths at between 15 million and 55 million.
1961 was the most brutal year of China's Three Years of Natural Disasters, during which over 10 million Chinese people starved to death, and cannibalism even occurred in rural areas. Despite this, 9.49 million newborns were born that year.
In 1959, Peng Dehuai was labeled anti-party by Mao Zedong for echoing Khrushchev's criticism of the Great Leap Forward and the People's Communes, ending his political life on the spot.
In 1959, Hu Jintao was admitted to Tsinghua University with excellent grades. He had originally intended to apply for the Department of Automatic Control, but due to his family background, he was reassigned to the Department of Hydraulic Engineering.
The Chinese People's Liberation Army launched an artillery bombardment on Kinmen, and the Republic of China armed forces stationed there returned fire. This military conflict is historically known as the August 23 Artillery Bombardment, also referred to as the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.
Huang Jing, the father of Yu Qiangsheng, died in Guangzhou. Officials claimed it was due to illness, but intra-party rumors suggested he suffered a mental breakdown after being reprimanded by Mao Zedong at the Nanning Conference.
During the 1957 rectification campaign, he was labeled a Rightist for offering opinions, expelled from the Party, removed from his posts, sent down to do manual labor, and went through the Cultural Revolution.
In 1958, an "Opinion on Restricting the Use of Wen Gang" appeared in the file of Wen Jiabao's father Wen Gang, and Wen Gang was labeled as one of the Five Black Categories and sent down to a farm.
The CCP implemented the Great Leap Forward policy. During this period, the climate was normal, and there were no large-scale wars or epidemics, yet at least 45 million Chinese people died abnormally, with causes of death including starvation, overwork, and beatings by cadres.
During the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, widespread large-scale cannibalism incidents broke out in places such as Xinyang, Tongwei in Gansu, Anhui, and Sichuan.
During the Great Leap Forward, local authorities at every level falsely inflated grain output figures. The central government collected grain based on these figures, ultimately triggering the great famine of 1958 to 1962, with various estimates putting abnormal deaths at between 15 million and 55 million people.
To provide fuel for "backyard furnaces", about 30% to 40% of rural houses were demolished during the Great Leap Forward, leaving people with nowhere to shelter from the wind and rain.
In 1958, the People's Liberation Army again carried out large-scale artillery bombardment of Kinmen and other coastal islands controlled by Taiwan.
During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Mao Zedong quoted the Zuo Zhuan idiom "If the skin is gone, what can the hair attach to," comparing intellectuals to hair clinging to the skin of the proletariat, and declared that intellectuals had lost the qualifications for independent survival.
Beginning in 1957, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was launched, resulting in the purge of numerous members of democratic parties and intra-party dissidents.
In the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Chinese Communist Party labeled some individuals as rightists because intellectuals had voiced their opinions, and the people involved and their families subsequently suffered long-term political and social consequences.
As General Secretary of the Secretariat of the CCP Central Committee, Deng Xiaoping was the frontline commander of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. He drafted documents and issued rigid quotas for the arrest of "rightists," leading to 550,000 intellectuals being labeled as such.
In 1957, the Chinese Communist Party shifted from encouraging free expression to launching the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Official statistics show that about 553,000 people were labelled as rightists, while declassified archival data put the figure at more than 3.17 million.
Through a series of political movements, the CCP has successfully established a totalitarian state devoid of any dissenting voices.
In January 1956, Beijing and large and medium-sized cities across the country rapidly completed the state-private joint ownership of entire industries. Through a fixed-interest system, the state peacefully bought out private industry and commerce, marking the basic completion of the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production.
According to the program, around 1956, the Rong family handed over enterprises such as cotton yarn and flour to the Communist Party, and relevant personnel participated in Shanghai's business and industrial circles.
In the 1956 joint state-private ownership, the tea shop run by Hu Jintao's father Hu Jingzhi in Taizhou was merged into a cooperative store. Hu Jingzhi went from being a small boss to a salaried clerk, and was labeled as being of bourgeois origin.
In a speech to Parliament, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pointed out that the Cairo Declaration was merely a statement of intent, and that the sovereignty of Taiwan had already been determined by the Treaty of San Francisco. He argued that the Taiwan issue had become an international matter involving the interests of multiple countries, rather than an internal affair of China.
With the adoption of the May Fourth Constitution in 1954, the National People's Congress replaced the CPPCC as the supreme organ of state power in China.
From 1954 to 1955, the People's Liberation Army shelled Kinmen and Matsu, attempting to seize the coastal islands controlled by Taiwan.
113 days after Stalin's death, Marshal Zhukov led officers into the meeting venue and arrested Beria on the spot; he was executed later that December.
On the day Stalin died, spy chief Beria began a power grab, bringing the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Defense under his own control, and then pushed for a mass release of prisoners.
In 1953, Taiwan promoted the Land-to-the-Tiller program. The government requisitioned rented land exceeding the standard to sell to tenant farmers, and compensated landlords with land bonds and stocks of four state-owned enterprises, objectively achieving the privatization of state-owned enterprises.
After Stalin's death, Mao Zedong felt the restraints on him loosen, began to develop an illusion of self-reliance, and looked down on Khrushchev.
Zhao Hanqi, a former Kuomintang military general who resisted Soviet invasions in the defense battles of Yining and Aksu in Xinjiang and later participated in the Xinjiang Peaceful Liberation, was publicly executed by the Chinese Communist Party during the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries campaign at the age of 39.
In 1952, affected by campaigns such as the Three-Anti and Five-Anti movements, a large number of capitalists and merchants in Shanghai chose to commit suicide by jumping from buildings, unable to bear the persecution.
In 1952, to cope with the external environment, China Resources was administratively transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Trade for supervision, but its nature as party property remained unchanged.
After a long tug-of-war, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve signed a famous accord, under which the Federal Reserve was freed from the obligation to peg government bond interest rates and regained the power to set interest rates, laying the foundation for central bank independence.
By the end of 1951, the CCP's campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries had led to the abnormal deaths of about 2 million people.
The CCP launched the "Three-Anti and Five-Anti" campaigns, seizing the property of capitalists and private business owners on a large scale under charges such as tax evasion, and conducting public humiliation and struggle sessions.
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) carries out a crackdown on counter-revolutionary movements, aiming to eliminate various personnel that threaten the regime, resulting in about 2,000,000 deaths.
Between 1950 and 1953, China dispatched troops to support North Korea against South Korea and the United Nations Command, becoming one of the major external wars China participated in after 1949.
After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the U.S. Seventh Fleet established the Taiwan Strait Patrol Force. Destroyers and capital ships conducted routine patrols in the Taiwan Strait, deterring conflict and ensuring the strait remained open to international navigation, which laid the foundation for nearly two decades of peace in the Taiwan Strait.
In June 1950, the Agrarian Reform Law of the People's Republic of China was promulgated, and land reform rolled out across rural areas nationwide. Although the original intent was to distribute landlords' land to poor peasants, in actual implementation it evolved into a bloody and violent plundering feast, with numerous landlords stripped of their land and killed. Death tolls estimated by various scholars range between 200,000 and 2 million.
After the Korean War began in June 1950, a long-term policy reality formed among the United States, Taiwan, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): the mainland and Taiwan were treated as two separate political entities. Since then, in handling the Taiwan Strait issue, the U.S. has not viewed Taiwan's status as having been finalized by any international document, but has instead continued to make policy arrangements surrounding cross-strait relations, the use of force, and Taiwan's political future.
On June 25, 1950, the Korean People's Army crossed the 38th parallel southward, and the Korean War broke out; in October of the same year, China entered the war.
The CCP launched a nationwide land reform movement, inciting hatred and violence, which resulted in the massacre of approximately 2 million landlords and their families.
After the outbreak of the Korean War in late June 1950, U.S. President Truman declared the Taiwan Strait neutral, blocking either side of the strait from attacking the other.
In March 1950, Gao Gang presented a set of data at the representatives' meeting of the Northeast Bureau, showing that the Northeast accounted for an extremely high proportion of the nation's coal, pig iron, steel, electricity and railways at the time, and was the country's most important industrial base.