18 - China under Mao, 1949–1976

Summary

In 1949 the red flag was raised over the Forbidden City in Beijing, as Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. How should we characterise the mass killings of ordinary people during the following decades? This chapter will focus on how the regime treated the majority of the population it classified, however arbitrarily, as ‘Han Chinese’. A separate discussion would be necessary to examine what happened in the border areas inhabited by what were called ‘minority nationalities’, from Tibet and the Muslim belt running through Xinjiang, Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu to Inner Mongolia. Whether or not these killings, intentional or otherwise, should be characterised as genocide will depend on the definition one adopts. As Norman Naimark has pointed out, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the foundational legal document adopted by the United Nations in 1948, excluded crimes of humanity against social and political groups from its definition, largely as the result of sustained opposition from the Soviet and other delegates who worried that the repression of their own people at home might be considered genocidal. As a result, few scholars have used the term to qualify crimes against identifiable groups of people seen to belong to the same ‘national’ group as the perpetrators, whether ‘kulaks’ (farmers classified as ‘rich peasants’) or the nobility in the Soviet Union or those defined by the Nazis as ‘homosexuals’ or ‘handicapped’.¹