ABSTRACT
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded on October 1, 1949, after the Communists defeated the Nationalists in a civil war during 1946–1949. The Nationalists retreated to Taiwan and the Communists unified the mainland. The period of 1949–1953 was the phase of political consolidation and economic recovery, but the task was complicated and challenged by the Korean War. China was divided into six major administrative regions after the CCP took power, and a tripartite structure of the party, the military and the administration formed the governing system. In the phase of consolidation and unification of China, the CCP-led government carried out major land reforms, nationalization of business enterprises, clean-ups of social vices of prostitution and opium addition, massive sanitation movements and disease prevention campaigns, recovery of economic production, and participation in the Korean War. Local governments mobilized the masses to participate in these programs of reforms to change the society with tremendous national pride and enthusiasm. When the Korean War was over and peace returned in 1953, the government turned its attention to systematic reconstruction of a socialist China. The country was re-structured from the six military regions into twenty-two provinces and five autonomous regions. The central government strengthened its relations with local governments and played the leading role in national economic planning and social reforms. Following the Soviet model, the government created the first five-year plan to guide national economic reconstruction. As the Cold War had shaped the world into a bi-polar system with the United States and the Soviet Union promoting competing ideologies and paradigms of modernization, the Soviet Union exerted broad influence on many fronts of China’s socialist reconstruction in the 1950s.
