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Qing Dynasty broke out during this period. These revolutionary movements dealt heavy blows to imperialist influences in China, but they failed to deliver the nation from semi-colonialism.
A fundamental change took place only after the Chinese people, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, overthrew the Kuomintang reactionary rule and founded the People's Republic of China. After its birth in 1921, the Communist Party of China set the clear-cut goal in its political programme to "overthrow the oppression by international imperialism and achieve the complete independence of the Chinese nation" and to "overthrow the warlords and unite China into a real democratic republic"; it led the people in an arduous struggle culminating in victory in the national democratic revolution.
The founding of the People's Republic of China eradicated the forces of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism in the Chinese mainland, put an end to the nation's history of dismemberment, oppression and humiliation at the hands of alien powers for well over a century and to long years of turbulence characterized by incessant war and social disunity, and realized the people's cherished dream of national independence and unification. The Chinese nation, which makes up one-fourth of the world's population, is no longer one that the aggressors could kill and insult at will. The Chinese people have stood up as the masters of their own country; for the first time they have won real human dignity and the respect of the whole world. The Chinese people have won the basic guarantee for their life and security.
National independence has protected the Chinese people from being trodden under the heels of foreign invaders. However, the problem of the people's right to subsistence can be truly solved only when their basic means of livelihood are guaranteed.
To eat their fill and dress warmly were the fundamental demand of the Chinese people who had long suffered cold and hunger. Far from meeting this demand, successive regimes in old China brought even more disasters to the people. In those days, landlords and rich peasants who accounted for 10% of the rural population held 70% of the land, while the poor peasants and farm labourers who accounted for 70% of the rural population owned only 10% of the land. The bureaucrat- comprador bourgeoisie who accounted for only a small fraction of the population monopolized 80% of the industrial capital and controlled the economic lifelines of the country. The Chinese people were repeatedly exploited by land rent, taxes, usury and industrial and commercial capital.
The exploitation and poverty they suffered were of a degree rarely seen in other parts of the world. According to 1932 statistics, the Chinese peasants were subjected to 1,656 kinds of exorbitant taxes and levies, which took away 60-90% of their harvests. The people's miseries were exacerbated and their lives made all the harsher by the reactionary governments who, politically corrupt and impotent, surrendered China's sovereign rights under humiliating terms and served as tools of foreign imperialist rule, and by the separatist regime of warlords who were embroiled in endless wars. It was estimated that 80% of the populace in old China suffered to varying degrees of starvation and tens of thousands hundreds of
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thousands in some cases died of it every year. A major natural disaster invariably left the land strewn with corpses of hunger victims. More than 3.7m lives were lost when floods hit east China in 1931. In 1943, a crop failure in Henan Province took the lives of 3m people and left 15m subsisting on grass and bark and struggling on the verge of death. After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan, the reactionary Kuomintang government launched a civil war, fed on the flesh and blood of the people and caused total economic collapse. In 1946, 10m people died of hunger countrywide. In 1947, 100m, or 22% of the national population then, were under the constant threat of hunger.
Ever since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government have always placed the task of helping the people get enough to wear and eat on the top of the agenda. For the first three years of the People's Republic, the Chinese people, led by their government, concentrated their efforts on healing the wounds of war and quickly restored the national economy to the record level in history. On this basis, China lost no time to complete the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicraft industry and capitalist industry and commerce, thus uprooting the system of exploitation, instituting the system of socialism and, for the first time in history, turning the people into masters of the means of production and beneficiaries of social wealth.
This fired the people with soaring enthusiasm for building a new China and a new life, emancipated the social productive forces and set the economy on the track of unprecedented growth. Since 1979, China has switched the focus of its work to economic construction, begun reform and opening to the outside world, and set the goal of building socialism with Chinese characteristics. This has further expanded the social productive forces and enabled the nation to basically solve the problem of feeding and clothing its 1.1bn people.
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Tilling 7% of the world's total cultivated land - averaging only 1.3 mu (one mu equals one-fifteenth of one hectare) per capita as against 12.16 mu in the USA and the world's average of 4.52 mu China has nevertheless succeeded in feeding a population that makes up 22% of the world's total. Contrary to some Western politicians' prediction that no Chinese government could solve the problem of feeding its people, socialist China has done it by its own efforts. The past 40-odd years have witnessed a marked increase in the average annual per-capita consumption of major consumer goods despite a yearly average population increase of 14m. A survey shows that the daily caloric intake of food per resident in China was 2,270 in 1952, 2,311 in 1978 and 2,630 in 1990, approaching the world's average.
The life-span of the Chinese people has lengthened and their health improved considerably. According to statistics, the population's average life expectancy increased from 35 years before liberation to 70 years in 1988, higher than the average level in the world's medium-income countries, while the death rate dropped from 33 per thousand before liberation to 6.67 per thousand in 1990, which was one of the lowest death rates in the world China's 1987 infant mortality of 31 per thousand approached the level of high-income countries. The health of the Chinese people, especially the physical development of