Topic 8.4

📍Topic 8.4 Spread of Communism after 1900

📖 AMSCO p.571- p.578

Main Idea

Key Timeline

Image Courtesy of Sandra

Things to Know

Communism in China

• By 1927 the Nationalists and Communists in China were fighting for control of the country (paused after Japanese invasion) and continued after Japan’s defeat in 1945
  • The large peasant population in China allowed Mao Zedong and the Communists to gain support for their agenda that focused on redistributing land from landlords to the peasants
  • By 1949 Mao and the Communists defeated the Nationalists and established the People’s Republic of China as a communist nation with majority nationalized industries
• Mao’s agenda included many five-year plans in the style of Stalin’s in the USSR focused on rapidly reorganizing the agrarian economy and promoting rural industrialization
  • Chief among these reforms was the Great Leap Forward
  • Taking of land previously held by landlords and redistributing to peasant as land fit to use for the collectivist agricultural communes
• Adherence to communism were promoted through cultural reforms like Cultural Revolution
• In Communist China, refusal to comply with land and cultural reforms could lead to being sent to a “reeducation” camp or killed
• Failure of collectivist agricultural communes to produce food caused massive food shortages that led to the starvation and deaths of millions
• Its relationship with the other major communist global power, the USSR, was not entirely peaceful due to their competition as the most influential communist nation

Foreign Influence in Iran

• By the early 1900s and Britain and Russia vied for control over the country due to its oil reserves
  • To prevent the country's leader caving to Hitler during WWII, Britain and Russia mutually agreed to invade Iran and force him out to make way for his son Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi as ruler
  • The two powers remained in the country until the war’s end
• Nationalists opposed the western-backed shah, pushed him to flee, and selected a prime minister to lead Iran but he was overthrown by US and British forces who helped reinstall the shah
• The Shah instituted many progressive reforms in the White Revolution, but used brutal secret police force to do it
  • Significant reforms included women’s right to vote and land reform to give more land to peasants
  • These were opposed greatly by religious conservatives
  • Civilians also opposed these changes because landowners were forced to give away land and majority of peasants still gained nothing from the reforms
• While communism was staved off, the Iranian Revolution in 1979 toppled the shah and put in place a theocracy that opposed Western policies

Latin American

• The concentration of land ownership among the few was a large issue in Latin American countries following independence from colonialism
• In Venezuela, the government confiscated land and redistributed about 5 million acres of land
• In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company felt threatened by the land reforms imposed by the Jacob Arbenz’ democratically elected government and lobbied the U.S. to remove him
  • He was overthrown in 1954

Land Reform in Asia and Africa

• After Vietnam declared independence from Japan and France at the end of WWII, Communists seized land from large landowners and redistribute it to peasants
• South Vietnam was slower to implement land reform than the North making it less popular and splitting the two regions along the lines of communism
• In Ethiopia post-WWII, the government of Haile Selassie aligned with western powers and found economic success from the coffee trade but was unable to implement land reform
  • People became unsatisfied with Selassie’s leadership and he was deposed in 1974 by Mengistu Haile Mariam and Mariam’s military leaders who declared the country socialist and aligned itself with the USSR
  • This caused famine, economic instability, and rebellion and Mariam eventually fled the country to Zimbabwe
• After India became an independent state:
  • Land reforms were attempted to distribute land to the landless from rent collectors
  • Protections were imposed to help tenants become more independent from landowners and purchase their own land
• Eventually the progress of land reform was slowed

Terms to Remember