ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the Chinese Revolution and its impacts during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The chapter describes conditions and events that led many of China’s people to support revolution, including decades of population growth that stressed resources, military defeats by European nations and Japan which burdened China with huge war indemnities and unfavorable trade relationships, and massive peasant rebellions. China’s republican revolution is depicted, along with its central leader Sun and his Three Principles of the People. The divisions within China’s on-going revolutionary movement are discussed, along with the factors that led to civil war between its right and left factions. Why communist revolutionary leaders concluded that the Chinese situation required a revolutionary strategy different from that of Russian revolutionaries to achieve success is explained. The emergence of Mao as a key revolutionary leader is presented as well as the role of World War II and other factors contributing to communist victory. The chapter also reveals the causes and results of the Great Leap Forward, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, China’s post-1978 economic reforms and economic growth, the 1989 Pro-Democracy Movement, and the Hong Kong Democracy Movements. China’s current world-wide economic and political relations are also outlined.
