The Guardian Weekly 09.10.09 25
Mao's China, 60 years on
F
ewcouldhaveimaginedthisday,when
communistideasfirstbegantospread
in China in the 1920s. The nationalist
leader Chiang Kai-shek's vicious
crackdown in Shanghai in 1927 had
threatened to wipe out the party. But
communist armed forces established bases in the
south and turned from the urban poor to the peas-
antry as the base of their support. As Chiang con-
tinued his campaign against them, they embarked
on the Long March in 1934: an astounding journey
takingthemthousandsofkilometrestoanewcentre
in the north.
Three years later, the two sides were forced into
anallianceagainstacommonenemy�theJapanese.
By the end of the second world war, full-scale civil
war resumed and Communist party membership,
and the Red forces, had mushroomed. After three
more years of bitter fighting � resulting in at least
two million deaths, according to official figures �
MaoZedongproclaimedthecreationofthePeople's
Republic of China on 1 October 1949.
The last six decades have seen extraordinary
accomplishments, misjudgments and atrocities,
and remarkable reversals. The party would seize
land and hand it to peasant farmers; force them to
form communes; then allow them to farm it indi-
vidually again. The 30 years since the economy was
opened up has seen the undoing of much of what
went before, as "socialism with Chinese character-
istics" � a capitalist economy, allied to the existing
political system � has transformed the nation that
Mao created.
Hou Bo, Mao's photographer
HouBoshouldneverhavegottheassignment.Aged
just 25, she had picked up a camera after stints as
a nurse and teaching peasant farmers to read. But
all the more experienced photographers were in
the provinces and could not reach Beijing in time.
So when Chairman Mao stood on the rostrum of
Tiananmen Square and proclaimed the creation of
the People's Republic to cheering crowds beneath,
it was Hou who captured the moment.
Crammedintoatinyspace�withherhusband,Xu
Xiaobing, who was filming � she struggled to com-
pose a shot with her Rolleiflex. "The machine could
only take 12 pictures at a time. I didn't have a wide-
angle or long lens," she says. Leaning far back over
the rails, she realised it was a long way down if she
fell. "It was dangerous � very dangerous. But I was
veryexcitedandthisphotowasveryimportant,"she
says. "Later, I noticed that somebody was hanging
on to my shirt [to protect me]. I turned around and
had a look. Oh � it was Zhou Enlai." Zhou was, after
Mao, one of the defining
Four Communist party veterans, including a Long March survivor,
reflect on the history of the People's Republic with Tanya Branigan
Belonging without boundaries A testimony to the
resilience of the Christian community Books, page 39
Continued on page 26
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