People's Republic of China

On 1 October 1949, in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Mao Zedong (毛泽东), chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, proclaimed the People's Republic of China (中华人民共和国). The "March of the Volunteers" was played as the new national anthem and the five-starred red flag was raised for the first time.

In its first years the regime carried out land reform (土地改革). A Land Reform Law was passed in 1950, and by 1953 redistribution was complete on the mainland except in a few regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet: hundreds of millions of peasants received a plot of land for the first time. Landlords' land was confiscated; the landlords themselves were denounced at public "struggle sessions", and many were killed. Estimates of the death toll range from several hundred thousand to several million.

From 1953 the party moved on to collectivisation: peasants were compelled to join cooperatives, later grouped into people's communes. In 1956–1957 the Hundred Flowers Campaign encouraged free expression and criticism of the government. But in June 1957 Mao, who now saw the criticism as a threat to party rule, launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign (反右运动): according to official figures at least 550,000 people, mostly intellectuals, were persecuted as "rightists"; some researchers put the number at 1 to 2 million or more.

Three reforms of the 1950s underlie the Chinese that learners study today: the standard language, simplified characters and pinyin.

In 1955 the new regime replaced the Republic's term guoyu ("national language") with putonghua (普通话, "common speech"); Taiwan still says guoyu. On 6 February 1956 a State Council directive defined it as the language that takes Beijing pronunciation as its standard, the northern dialects as its base and exemplary modern vernacular writings as its grammatical norm.

The script was simplified at the same time. On 28 January 1956 the State Council adopted the Scheme for Simplifying Chinese Characters (汉字简化方案): 515 simplified characters and 54 simplified components, brought into use in stages. In May 1964 the General List of Simplified Characters (简化字总表) completed it, with 2,238 characters. A second round of simplifications, issued in 1977, was withdrawn in 1986, when the General List was republished with a few changes. In 2013 the State Council issued a new List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters (8,105 characters). Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan keep traditional characters.

Finally, on 11 February 1958 the National People's Congress approved the Hanyu Pinyin scheme (汉语拼音方案), drawn up by a group of linguists in which the economist Zhou Youguang, often called the "father of pinyin", played a central part. Pinyin was introduced in primary schools to teach standard pronunciation and replaced zhuyin on the mainland; it has become the international standard for romanising Chinese (ISO 7098).

In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward (大跃进), a campaign of mass mobilisation meant to turn an agrarian country into an industrial society. Peasants were grouped into people's communes (人民公社) and private farming was banned. Much of the workforce was diverted from the fields to making steel in "backyard furnaces", and farm output collapsed. Local officials reported inflated harvests, and the state set its grain procurement on the basis of these false figures. At the Lushan Conference in July–August 1959 the defence minister, Marshal Peng Dehuai, was the only senior leader to criticise the policy openly: he was replaced by Lin Biao, and the campaigns against "rightists" that followed made the misreporting and requisitions worse.

The result was the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961, the "three years of great famine" (三年大饥荒). Estimates of the death toll range from 15 to 55 million, most of them from starvation; it is widely regarded as the deadliest famine in history.

Early in 1962, at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, head of state Liu Shaoqi blamed the disaster "three parts on natural calamities, seven parts on human error" (三分天灾，七分人祸), and Mao handed day-to-day leadership to more pragmatic leaders. The regime first called the famine the "Three Years of Natural Disasters" (三年自然灾害). In June 1981 it renamed it the "Three Years of Difficulty" (三年困难时期) and officially attributed it mainly to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward and the struggle against "right deviation", as well as to natural disasters and the split with the Soviet Union.

In May 1966 Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (文化大革命), claiming that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society in order to restore capitalism. He called on the young to rebel: across the country Red Guards (红卫兵) formed, inspired by the "Little Red Book" of Mao's quotations, revered as part of his personality cult. They attacked the "Four Olds" (old ideas, culture, customs and habits), destroying artefacts, temples and historic sites, and intellectuals and party officials were humiliated in public. Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, died as a result of persecution; Deng Xiaoping was purged twice. Rival factions fought one another with weapons; from 1968 the army took control and suppressed the Red Guard movement.

Schools and universities closed, the university entrance examination was cancelled, and more than ten million urban young people were sent to the countryside (上山下乡). Tens of millions of people were persecuted. Estimates of the death toll vary enormously, from hundreds of thousands to millions; the highest reach 20 million.

Mao died on 9 September 1976. On 6 October his widow Jiang Qing and three allies, the Gang of Four (四人帮), were arrested, which is usually taken as the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1981 the party declared it "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the people, the country, and the party since the founding of the People's Republic". In China it is often called the "ten years of chaos" (十年动乱).

After Mao's death Deng Xiaoping (邓小平, 1904–1997), purged twice during the Cultural Revolution, outmanoeuvred his rivals and became the country's paramount leader. On 18 December 1978 the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee launched the policy of reform and opening up (改革开放). Victims of the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated.

The people's communes were abolished and farming decollectivised; price controls were relaxed and foreign investment was allowed in, notably in special economic zones set up from 1980, the best known being Shenzhen. A new constitution was adopted in December 1982, and the one-child policy was introduced to curb population growth.

Reform opened decades of very rapid growth: China went from being one of the poorest countries in the world to an upper-middle-income one, and in 2010 its economy overtook Japan's to become the second largest in the world. It also brought corruption, widening inequality and severe pollution. On the political side, the reforms begun in the 1980s came to an end in 1989.

Reform also brought inflation, corruption and demands for political change. On 15 April 1989 Hu Yaobang died, a reformist former general secretary of the party who had been removed in 1987; spontaneous gatherings in Tiananmen Square (天安门广场) in Beijing called for his rehabilitation. For nearly two months students, intellectuals and workers demonstrated against corruption and inflation and called for political reform, democracy and freedom of the press. On 13 May students began a hunger strike; on 17 May about a million people were gathered in the square, and protests spread to some 400 cities.

The party leadership was divided: General Secretary Zhao Ziyang wanted concessions, while Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng chose martial law, declared on 20 May. On the night of 3–4 June the army advanced on the square and opened fire on crowds trying to block its way; demonstrators, bystanders and soldiers were killed or wounded, mostly in western Beijing along Chang'an Avenue rather than in the square itself. The death toll remains uncertain: official Chinese figures are in the order of 200 to 300 dead, soldiers included, while other estimates range from several hundred to several thousand.

Mass arrests followed; Zhao Ziyang was dismissed and placed under house arrest, and Jiang Zemin became party leader. Western countries condemned the crackdown and imposed an arms embargo. Officially called the "political turmoil between spring and summer 1989" and commonly the "June Fourth Incident" (六四事件), the events remain heavily censored in China. Political reform stopped; economic reform slowed, then was relaunched by Deng's "southern tour" of 1992.

Deng died in February 1997, shortly before the return of Hong Kong, which he had negotiated. At midnight on 1 July 1997 the United Kingdom handed Hong Kong (香港) back to China, ending 156 years of British rule. In the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, China had pledged to keep the territory's system in place for 50 years under the formula "one country, two systems" (一国两制) devised by Deng; Hong Kong became the first special administrative region. Macau (澳门), under Portuguese rule since 1557, became the second on 20 December 1999. After protests in Hong Kong in 2019–2020, a national security law for the city was enacted in 2020.

On 11 December 2001 China joined the World Trade Organization, after long negotiations that required deep changes to its economy. From 8 to 24 August 2008 Beijing hosted the Olympic Games, the first held in China; the host nation topped the gold-medal table with 48. The choice of Beijing had been criticised by Western politicians and NGOs over human rights and censorship, while China insisted that the Games should not be politicised. With the 2022 Winter Games, Beijing became the first city to have hosted both the Summer and the Winter Olympics.

After Deng, the country's paramount leaders have been Jiang Zemin (1989–2002), Hu Jintao (2002–2012) and, since 2012, Xi Jinping.