The Communist party was able to come to power in China because the people supported it. However, when the Communist party began attacking landlords, intellectuals, and anyone they believed to be anti-communist, the Chinese people who were once supporting the communist party because it worked to help all mankind, now found themselves supporting the Communist party because they felt they had no choice. Many were worried that someone who disliked them would blame them of being anti-communist, or that if they stood up for something they would be punished. The people of China slowly became wary of the terror that Communism brought to their streets.
The Communist party also remained too dependent on the Soviet Union. When Mao came into power, he “adopted the Soviet model rather than building a new order based upon peasant experience or the needs of Chinese agriculture.” (The Mao Regime, 450) Again, the Communist party was forgetting who brought them to power, the peasants. The party should have worked harder to remember the small people that brought them to power, rather than working so hard to become one of the bigger people. The Soviet model was not for China, it was for the Soviet Union and China would have benefited from deriving their own model instead of mimicking another. As a result, the urban population ended up benefiting the most from the Communist changes. Moa also pushed too hard for big reforms to happen quickly. He pushed the collectivization of farmland in China and lost many supporters who were not ready for the move. The Great Leap Forward was another one of Mao’s strong pushes for reform. He wanted industrialization; he wanted China to be the best at it. So, he developed backyard furnaces to push an increase in steel production. He also developed communes to increase agriculture in China. And with this move to communes, he announced that China “was on the verge of communism.” (The Mao Regime, 451) This caused a falling out with Russia and even almost a war. All of these moves were bad on Mao’s part. Agriculture dropped because of the communes and everyone was too scared to tell their authority figures of the decrease in food until it was too late and China faced a deathly famine. On top of this, the backyard furnaces were not even very useful. Most of the steel produced in them was useless. And through it all, China lost the support of the Soviet Union: the country that had taught them the reforms that got China where it was. But Mao was making too much of an effort to pass the Soviet Union up, instead of realizing where the countries strength was coming from. As a result Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi put forth an idea for more moderate movement towards communism. One that Mao and the people of China could have benefited from. But Mao was not one to accept defeat, so instead of accepting the reforms he accused them of