Communist China, Taiwan and Korea

The rise of the CCP. The Japanese invasion of 1937 forced the Guomindang to retreat; the long war exhausted China, and prices rose 30 per cent a month between 1945 and 1949. The countryside faced ecological crisis (soil exhaustion, deforestation, floods) and a social one (exploitative land tenure, debt, poor technology). The CCP, founded in 1921 after the Russian Revolution, grew powerful under Mao Zedong, who broke with the usual Marxist view that revolution would come from city workers and based his revolution on the peasantry.

• In the mountains of Jiangxi (1928 to 1934), Mao's communists organised a peasants' council (soviet), confiscated and redistributed land, and set up their own government and army.
• Mao supported rural women's associations and a new marriage law banning arranged marriages and making divorce simpler.
• A Guomindang blockade forced the Long March (1934 to 1935), 6,000 gruelling miles to a new base at Yanan, where they fought warlords and foreign imperialism and carried out land reform, winning strong support.
• After the war against Japan, the communists defeated the Guomindang. The People's Republic of China was founded in 1949.

Changing course, 1949 to 1978:

• New Democracy: an alliance of all classes; key industries came under government control, and private ownership was gradually ended. From 1953, a programme of socialist transformation.
• The Great Leap Forward (1958) pushed rapid industrialisation, even backyard steel furnaces, and people's communes: by 1958, 26,000 communes covered 98 per cent of the farm population. But the backyard steel was useless, and leaders such as Liu Shaochi and Deng Xiaoping tried to modify the communes.
• Mao answered his critics with the Cultural Revolution (from 1965), using Red Guards against 'old' culture and customs, valuing ideology over expertise. It brought turmoil and badly damaged the economy and education.

Reform from 1978. Deng Xiaoping kept the Party in firm control while introducing a socialist market economy. The goal was the Four Modernisations: science, industry, agriculture and defence. A wall-poster in 1978 demanded a 'Fifth Modernisation', democracy; such demands were suppressed. In 1989, students demonstrating for openness in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, were brutally repressed. Today China is an economic powerhouse, but critics point to growing inequalities, and some argue China should build a modern society on its own traditions.

Taiwan. Defeated in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, a Japanese colony from 1895 to 1945, and set up the Republic of China. His government was repressive, banning free speech and opposition and excluding local Taiwanese from power. But it carried out land reforms and modernised the economy, so that by 1973 Taiwan's GNP was second in Asia only to Japan's, with a narrowing gap between rich and poor. After Chiang's death (1975), and especially after martial law was lifted in 1987 and opposition parties allowed, Taiwan became a democracy. Most countries keep only trade missions there, since Taiwan is considered part of China; relations across the strait have improved through trade and travel.

Korea under Japan and war. Korea's Joseon dynasty (1392 to 1910) tried to modernise under foreign pressure, but Japan annexed Korea in 1910. Koreans resisted the suppression of their culture, set up a provisional government and appealed to world leaders. Japanese rule ended in 1945, but Korea was divided at the 38th parallel, and separate governments formed in 1948. The Korean War (1950 to 1953), with the US-led UN backing the South and communist China the North, ended in an armistice and left Korea divided and devastated.

South Korea's growth. President Syngman Rhee was forced out by the April Revolution (1960) against a rigged election, but General Park Chung-hee seized power in a military coup in 1961 and was elected president in 1963. His government drove state-led, export-oriented growth: first light industries like textiles and garments, then steel, shipbuilding, electronics and chemicals.

• The New Village (Saemaul) Movement (1970) encouraged rural people to help themselves modernise their villages; Korea now shares its lessons with developing countries.
• Growth rested on strong leaders, skilled bureaucrats, ambitious industrialists, and a literate workforce.
• But Park's Yusin Constitution (1972) gave the president almost unlimited power, suspending democracy. He was assassinated in 1979.

South Korea's democracy. Another coup, led by Chun Doo-hwan, followed. In 1980, students and citizens in Gwangju demanded an end to martial law (the Gwangju Democratisation Movement) and were suppressed. In 1987, news of a student's death under torture sparked the June Democracy Movement, joined by the middle class, which forced direct presidential elections.

• In 1992 a civilian, Kim Young-sam, was elected after decades of military rule; Korea joined the OECD in 1996.
• In the 1997 currency crisis, Korea received emergency help from the IMF, while citizens donated gold in a Gold Collection Movement to help repay foreign loans.
• In 1997 opposition leader Kim Dae-jung won: the first peaceful transfer of power; others followed in 2008 and 2017.
• In 2016, peaceful candlelight protests led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, showing the maturity of Korean democracy, driven above all by citizens' political awareness.