After defeating the Nationalists, the CCP systematically destroyed China’s mediating institutions — churches, local militias, and even the family, which Mao attacked in the 1950s by forcing couples into dormitories and children into state nurseries. Mosher recalls villagers in Junan Commune telling him in 1979–80 that life was better in 1949, before communist rule. Mao’s “democratic dictatorship” targeted “bad antagonistic classes” — Nationalist officials, landlords, and rich peasants — leading to purges and executions in the millions. So-called landlords were often just villagers who leased out modest surplus land; their confiscated land was never returned to peasants but absorbed into state collectives, making the CCP itself China’s ultimate “big landlord,” a term used as an insult. Externally, the CCP turned expansionist: entering the Korean War with human-wave attacks, making North Korea a tributary state; breaking its 1950 promise of Tibetan autonomy by invading in 1958–59 and exiling the Dalai Lama; fighting India in 1961; clashing with Soviet forces in 1968; and funding guerrillas that helped bring communism to Vietnam and Indochina. Early CCP survival depended heavily on Soviet arms and captured Japanese weaponry in Manchuria. China remains one of the few empires to survive intact into the modern era, retaining Manchuria, half of Mongolia, Tibet, Yunnan, and Xinjiang. Mao twice threatened Taiwan (1954, 1958), deterred only by US naval power under Eisenhower. Despite claiming to be peaceful, Mosher argues China has “very bloody borders,” expanding by force since 1949 — a pattern that continued after Mao’s death.
1 What did villagers in Junan Commune privately tell Mosher about life before and after 1949?
2 How did Mao's commune system in the 1950s attack the traditional family?
3 What pejorative term did Chinese villagers use to describe the CCP after land reform?
4 What happened to Tibet's promised autonomy under the 1950 agreement with Mao?
5 What stopped Mao's threatened invasions of Taiwan during the 1954 and 1958 Taiwan Straits crises?
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