Mao had no choice but to bring widespread benefits to the Chinese people in the years of 1949-56, this was because he was afraid of counter-revolution, and discoveries of large armaments in a GMD (Chinese Nationalist Party) base in the early years of his power shows he was right to be afraid. His initial aim was to get people on side and be conciliatory, which is important after a civil war. This was more prominent in the first three years, the crackdown on crime in cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, the land reform and focus on women’s rights. However the lessons Mao had learned in his struggle to power was that the only way to gain and sustain a proletarian revolution was through violence. After the first three years Mao felt he could start implementing his own ideology since his power had become more established because he built popularity and loyalty. This technique was evident in all of the following policies.
Reunification Campaigns are a perfect example of Mao’s approach. The name would indicate a conciliatory policy at its finest and on the surface the majority of Chinese citizens supported Mao’s intention to bring everyone together after a civil war. There was a claim of assertion that Tibet had always historically belonged to China. However Tibetans had a different race, culture and religion. It was evident that they regarded themselves as separate people when they assembled a force of 60,000 to fight the PLA and preserve their land and culture. PLA won after 6 months, imposing a regime of terror and wiping out all traces of a separate Tibetan identity. Mao’s view on the necessity of violence is evident here, an idea that people would have to be ‘dragged by force’, subtly laying the foundations of a dictatorship. The same happened in Xingjian and Guangdong. Xingjiang, a Western province which boarded soviet controlled outer