8.4 Spread of Communism After 1900

4 min read•june 18, 2024

Jillian Holbrook

Katie Moore

AP World History: Modern 🌍

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Chinese Revolution 🇨🇳

The Chinese Revolution of 1900 destroyed the age-old dynasty system. Out of it emerged a republic led by Sun Yat-Sen. However, this republic soon collapsed due to warlord conflicts.

Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party

Nationalists took power next and established their government--the Kuomintang, which battled for political control against the Chinese Communist Party. Anger toward the Kuomintang sparked in the May Fourth Movement, a cultural and political movement that emerged in China in 1919. It was sparked by a widespread sense of national humiliation and disillusionment with traditional Chinese values in the wake of the country's defeat in World War I and the imposition of unequal treaties by foreign powers.

Student-led protests, intellectual debates, and cultural activism aimed at modernizing China and promoting democracy, science, and vernacular language during the May Fourth Movement played a key role in the intellectual and cultural transformation of China, laying the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rise to power in 1949.

Japan's Invasion of Manchuria

The CCP soon gained grassroots support and slowly started pushing the Kuomintang out of cities. However, the CCP’s real growth took off with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. The Kuomintang was split between defending the government from the CCP or Japanese aggression, and they elected to focus their attention on the CCP.

Conversely, the CCP started to fight the Japanese with the People's Liberation Army, which earned them widespread public support. The CCP also started to promote more education, better status for women, and peasant rebellion. All of this helped them gain support from commoners, and in 1949, the Chinese Communist Revolution ended with the CCP establishing the People’s Republic of China.

The Great Leap Forward

After the People's Republic of China gained control, the government made economic changes through the Great Leap Forward, a social and economic campaign launched by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of Mao Zedong from 1958 to 1962. Its goal was to rapidly transform China from an agricultural society into an industrialized one by mobilizing the population to create large-scale agricultural and industrial communes. However, the campaign's hasty and poorly-planned implementation, combined with natural disasters and mismanagement, led to widespread famine and the deaths of millions of people.

The Great Leap Forward was eventually abandoned in 1962, and its failure led to a significant shift in Chinese economic policies.

Communism’s Spread in Other Areas

Vietnam

The Vietnamese Communist Party, led by Ho Chi Minh, played a major role in the Vietnamese independence movement against French colonial rule. After World War II, Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which was not recognized by the French or the international community. The Vietnamese communists waged a long and bloody struggle against French colonial forces, culminating in the decisive defeat of the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. This led to the Geneva Accords, which partitioned Vietnam into the Communist-led North and the anti-Communist South.

Ethiopia 🇪🇹

Mengistu Haile Mariam converted Ethiopia into a communist regime as head of the ruling Marxist-Leninist party, the Workers' Party of Ethiopia. He nationalized industries and collectivized agriculture; however, his regime was characterized by widespread human rights abuses, including the execution of tens of thousands of political opponents and the forced relocation of millions of people. Mengistu's government also fought a costly war with Eritrea and faced a major famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people, which led to his ousting from power in 1991.

Land Reform in Kerala

The Indian state of Kerala elected a government that legitimized peasants’ right to cultivate the land and set a limit on the amount of land one could own.

Other states in India enacted similar reforms, such as abolishing the British Zamindari system (feudal landholding) and ending the position of intermediary tax collectors.

Iran 🇮🇷

The White Revolution (1963) was a set of aggressive modernization reforms, such as forcing big landholders to redistribute land, increasing federal funding for internal improvements, and encouraging industrial growth and education.

Reform in Latin America 🌎

In Latin America, there was a general trend of peasants taking over dispossessed states to cultivate, as well as a trend toward modernization. Some specific examples include Brazil, which added taxes on large land tracts, and Chile, which encouraged peasant farming on large plantations.