Volta
Politics1 October 1949

Founding of the People's Republic of China

Victorious in the civil war, the Communist Party proclaimed the People's Republic in Beijing. The Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan.

The Nationalists and Communists, who had cooperated against the warlords in the First United Front of the 1920s, went to war with each other after Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-communist purge of 1927. Hunted by Nationalist forces, the Communists settled in Yan’an after the Long March (1934–1935) and rallied around Mao Zedong. When Japan launched its full-scale invasion, the two parties fought Japan together in the Second United Front, during which the Communists greatly expanded their power in the countryside.

After Japan’s surrender the civil war resumed in 1946. The US-backed Nationalists had the upper hand at first but lost public support through corruption and runaway inflation, while the Communists, who won peasants over with land reform, prevailed in the great campaigns of 1948–1949. On 1 October 1949 Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China from the Tiananmen gate, and Chiang’s Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan in December.

The new government built a socialist system through land reform and nationalisation of industry and allied with the Soviet Union in 1950. When the Korean War broke out that year, China sent the People’s Volunteer Army into the war and so entered a long period of hostility with the United States. The division between the mainland and Taiwan continues today.

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States and rulers at the time
People's Republic of China · established — Paramount leader Mao Zedong
Republic of China

Before and after

Earlier
1946 Chinese Civil War
Later
1950 Korean War

Themes that include this event

  • Republican China and Imperial Japan1912 – 1949

    The age when the Republic of China, born of the 1911 Revolution, passed through warlord division, the May Fourth Movement, the United Front and the Northern Expedition, fought Japan’s invasion and split in civil war — as Japan moved from Taishō democracy through the Manchurian Incident and military coups to the war in China and the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and colonized Korea resisted through the March First Movement and armed struggle

  • The Cold War1945 – 1991

    From Yalta to the dissolution of the Soviet Union — half a century in which two blocs led by the US and the USSR divided the world