China

Click images to enlarge
The largest country in East Asia, bounded to the north by Mongolia; to the northwest by Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan; to the southwest by India, Nepal, and Bhutan; to the south by Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam; to the southeast by the South China Sea; to the east by the East China Sea, North Korea, and Yellow Sea; and to the northeast by Russia.

Government
China is divided into 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, and three municipalities (Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin), each with an elected local people's government with policy-making power in defined areas. Ultimate authority resides in the single-chamber National People's Congress (NPC), composed of about 2,970 deputies indirectly elected every five years through local people's congresses. Deputies to local people's congresses are directly elected through universal suffrage in constituency contests. The NPC, the ‘highest organ of state power’, meets annually and elects a permanent, 155-member standing committee to assume its functions between sittings. The committee has an inner body comprising a chair and 16 vice chairs. The NPC also elects for a five-year term a State Central Military Commission (SCMC), leading members of the judiciary, the vice-president, and the state president, who must be at least 45 years old. The president is restricted to two terms in office and performs primarily ceremonial functions. Executive administration is effected by a prime minister and a cabinet (state council) that includes three vice premiers, departmental ministers, state commission chiefs, the auditor general, the secretary general, and the governor of the Bank of China. The state council is appointed by and accountable to the NPC.

China's controlling force is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It has a parallel hierarchy comprising elected congresses and committees functioning from village level upwards and taking orders from above. A national party congress every five years elects a central committee of about 319 members (189 of whom have full voting powers) that meets twice a year and elects a Politburo of about 20 members and a five-member secretariat to exercise day-to-day control over the party and to frame state and party policy goals. The Politburo meets weekly and is China's most significant political body.

There have been, in recent years, moves towards increased democratization and decentralization, with allegedly competitive elections to the NPC's standing committee 1988 and secret voting introduced within the NPC from 1993. Efforts have also been made to more clearly demarcate state and party responsibilities and to reduce CPP interference in state decision-taking. China does not allow human-rights monitors into the country.

History
For details of Chinese history prior to the establishment of the People's Republic, see China: early imperial history 221 BC–AD 1279; China: late imperial history 1279–1900.

In 1949, after years of civil war, the Communists finally eliminated Nationalist (Guomindang) resistance on the mainland. The Communists proceeded to inaugurate the People's Republic of China (PRC), with Mao Zedong as chairman, the Nationalists having withdrawn to Taiwan.

Early reforms and reconstruction
The first major reform of the Communist regime was a general redistribution of land and reduction of rents while the civil war was still in progress, followed 1949–52 by an extension (albeit more muted) of agrarian reform to former Guomindang territories. Landlord property was divided among poor peasants, but rich and ‘middle’ peasants were spared confiscation. Another major social reform was the 1950 Marriage Law, which gave women equal rights in marriage, divorce, and property ownership.

When peace had been restored, economic reconstruction and industrialization were priorities. Mechanisms were put in place to ensure central direction of the economy, but at first the capitalist sector of the economy was left alone. A centralized Soviet-style constitution was adopted in 1954, and by February 1956 some 99% of privately-owned businesses had ‘entered into partnerships with the state’ (in other words, they were nationalized). Compensation to former owners – the ‘national capitalists’ – was paid in the form of interest right up to (and perhaps beyond) the Cultural Revolution.

The ‘Anti’ campaigns
During the period 1949–53 the Party grew from 4.5 to 6.6 million members. Other sections of the population such as workers, youth, women, and children were also recruited into mass organizations. Two major political campaigns took place, the ‘3 Anti’ campaign of 1951, which was directed against corruption, waste, and bureaucracy, and the ‘5 Anti’ campaign of 1952, directed principally against bribery, tax evasion, fraud, illegal use of public property, and stealing of economic secrets. The ‘3 Anti’ campaign was designed to whip the growing bureaucracy into line. The ‘5 Anti’ campaign was a major blow against bourgeois remnants in the new China.

Collectivization
After the 1949–53 land reforms mutual-aid teams were formed to share tasks in farming smallholdings. Soon ‘lower-level cooperatives’ came into being, in which payment to individual peasants was based partly on the amount of work done and partly on the amount of land contributed. Compared with the USSR under Stalin, collectivization in the PRC was carried out with caution and a degree of sensitivity. The next stage in 1956 was the formation of ‘advanced cooperatives’, which rewarded labour only.

The Hundred Flowers and anti-rightist campaigns
In 1956 Mao initiated the Hundred Flowers campaign to encourage criticism of bureaucracy in the party and administration. This was partly in response to the problems highlighted by the Hungarian uprising of 1956. By April 1957 the campaign had generated unwelcome heat, and was called off in June. An ‘anti-rightist’ campaign followed in which those who had spoken out most forthrightly were themselves criticized.

Foreign affairs in the 1950s
Early PRC foreign policy leant towards the USSR, which was the first country to recognize the new government (Britain did so in January 1950). In February 1950 Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), then premier and foreign minister, signed a treaty of friendship, alliance, and mutual assistance with the USSR, which over the next decade extended considerable aid to China. In 1950 Chinese troops overran Tibet, which later became an autonomous region of China. Opposition to Chinese rule there has been rigorously repressed.

The Chinese involvement in the Korean War (1950–53) ruled out any question of reconciliation with the USA, and intensified the ‘left turn’ of the regime domestically. China entered the war in November 1950 when US-led UN troops crossed the 38th parallel and reached the Chinese border, ignoring Chinese warnings. Victories against the better-equipped UN forces strengthened national pride. After the 1953 armistice the USA continued to withhold diplomatic recognition from the People's Republic. The USA also forbade trade with the PRC, blocked its entry into the UN, and continued to protect the Nationalist regime in Taiwan. The Communists made no attempt to invade Taiwan, but began bombardment of the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1958. Ritual bombardments continued for many years.

The Sino-Soviet split
At the end of the 1950s the Sino-Soviet alliance began to break down. There were many reasons for this development. The USSR had often ignored or trampled on the interests of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Chinese sources later revealed that after 1949 China was forced to trade with the USSR on disadvantageous terms. The PRC leadership saw the establishment of a policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the USSR and the USA after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis as a betrayal. Ideological differences, culminating in the late 1960s in Chinese charges of Soviet ‘revisionism’ and ‘social imperialism’, also played a role. Finally, China's promotion of its own developmental strategy at the expense of the Soviet model provoked withdrawal of Soviet aid and consequently much economic hardship in China.

China's attacks on the USSR began obliquely in 1960 with condemnations of Yugoslav revisionism. The split became irrevocable in 1962 when the USSR sided with India during a brief Sino-Indian border war. In 1963 the dispute became public and increasingly bad-tempered. During the 1960s the PRC entered into competition with the USSR for influence not only in the world Communist movement but also among the developing nations. In December 1963–February 1964 Zhou Enlai toured Africa and visited Burma (now Myanmar), Pakistan, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). This was part of China's non-aligned strategy, projecting itself as the voice of the developing world, although it achieved nuclear capability by 1964.

The Great Leap Forward
The first step in the evolution of an indigenous development strategy was the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of 1958. This called for the promotion of small-scale labour-intensive industry alongside the large-scale modern sector, a combination known as ‘walking on two legs’. At the same time 700,000 agricultural collectives were merged into 26,000 ‘People's Communes’ in an attempt to boost food output. The ideological aim was to achieve classless ‘true communism’.

The Great Leap failed, largely because it was wasteful of human and material resources and misdirected investment. The communes, at least in their immediate tasks, failed because their over-centralized structure alienated the peasants. These agricultural and industrial crises were compounded by terrible natural disasters in 1959 and 1960 and the Soviet withdrawal of blueprints and technicians in 1960. More than 20 million Chinese died as a result of floods and famine in this period.

Economic recovery
The failure of the Great Leap reduced Mao's influence 1962–65, and a successful ‘recovery programme’ was begun under President Liu Shaoqi. In March 1962 Zhou Enlai announced a new strategy, which gave agriculture first priority. Private farming plots and markets were reintroduced, communes reduced in size, and income differentials and material incentives restored. The period 1961–66 saw economic recovery, but at the expense of Mao's ‘revolutionary’ goals, and pragmatism and professionalism prevailed in the ‘Red versus expert’ debate. Mao himself came under veiled attack from liberal intellectuals, and retired for a time to the ‘second line’ – from where he began to set in motion a campaign to destroy the new balance of forces at the top.

The Cultural Revolution
Mao's plotting was to culminate in the eruption in 1966 of the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, a ‘rectification campaign’ directed against ‘rightists’ and ‘capitalist-roaders’ in the CCP and seeking to re-establish the supremacy of (Maoist) ideology over economics. Mao's aim was to repudiate bourgeois ideology and revisionism, inject fresh blood into a simplified administration, and revolutionize Chinese youth. Mao was supported by Lin Biao, chief of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and the Shanghai-based Gang of Four (led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing). Millions of student Red Guards – owing allegiance only to Mao – were encouraged to organize themselves against the party and government elite throughout China. The chief targets were Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping (head of the CCP secretariat), and Peng Zhen (mayor of Beijing), all of whom were forced out of office. Some 500,000 people are thought to have been killed during the Cultural Revolution, and millions of intellectuals and professionals were sent to work on communes. The education system was reduced to chaos.

Government institutions fell into abeyance and in the resulting disorder the PLA acquired unprecedented power. New ‘Three-Part Revolutionary Committees’, comprising Maoist party officials, trade unionists, and PLA commanders, took over the administration of the country. With the emergence of independent ‘ultra-left’ currents among Chinese youth and increasing resistance by many army units and cadres to Beijing, the Maoist centre reversed the radical tide after 1967. By 1968 schools were reopened, and millions of Red Guards ‘sent down’ to remote rural areas. The reconstruction of the party and administration began. By 1970 Mao had sided with pragmatic prime minister Zhou Enlai and started restoring order and creating a more balanced system.

Normalization and détente
In 1972 the Chinese government announced that Mao's named successor, Lin Biao, had been killed in an aeroplane crash the previous year while fleeing to the USSR after an unsuccessful coup attempt. Military influence waned, but remained above pre-1966 levels. In 1972–73 Deng Xiaoping, finance minister Li Xiannian, and others were rehabilitated. This reconstruction movement climaxed in the summoning of the National People's Congress (NPC) in 1975 for the first time in 11 years to ratify a new constitution and approve an economic plan termed the ‘Four Modernizations’ – agriculture, industry, armed forces, and science and technology – that aimed at placing China on a par with the West by the year 2000.

The early 1970s also witnessed the emergence of a policy of détente towards the USA. After the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces, the CCP leaders perceived a growing danger of Soviet invasion of China, especially after small border clashes began to occur in 1969 in the disputed Ussuri River region. Combined with prospects of US disengagement from the Vietnam War, the increased Sino-Soviet tensions prompted the PRC to seek normalization of relations with the USA, thus creating a more complex international alignment of forces. The visit of US President Nixon to China was followed by the visit of Japanese premier Kakuei Tanaka in 1972. In October 1971 the PRC was admitted to the UN, from which Taiwan was now excluded. Full diplomatic relations were established with the USA in 1979.

After Mao
The deaths of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1976 unleashed a violent succession struggle between the leftist Gang of Four, led by Jiang Qing, and moderate ‘rightists’, grouped around the vice premier, Deng Xiaoping. Deng was forced into hiding by the Gang; and Mao's moderate protégé Hua Guofeng became CCP chair and head of government in 1976. Hua arrested the Gang on charges of treason and held power 1976–78 as a stopgap leader, continuing Zhou Enlai's modernization programme. His authority was progressively challenged, however, by Deng Xiaoping, who returned to office in 1977 after campaigns in Beijing.

Deng in power
By 1979, after further popular campaigns, Deng had gained effective charge of the government, controlling a majority in the Politburo. State and judicial bodies began to meet again, the late Liu Shaoqi was rehabilitated as a party hero, and economic reforms were introduced. These involved the dismantling of the commune system, the introduction of direct farm incentives under a new ‘responsibility system’, and the encouragement of foreign investment in ‘Special Economic Zones’ in coastal enclaves.

By June 1981 Deng's supremacy was assured when his protégés Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang had become party chair and prime minister respectively, and the Gang of Four were sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1982, Hua Guofeng and a number of senior colleagues were ousted from the Politburo, and the NPC adopted a definitive constitution, restoring the post of state president (abolished in 1975) and establishing a new code of civil rights.

Modernization
The new administration was a collective leadership, with Hu Yaobang in control of party affairs, Zhao Ziyang overseeing state administration, and Deng Xiaoping (a party vice chair and chair of the State Central Military Commission) formulating long-term strategy and supervising the PLA. The triumvirate streamlined the party and state bureaucracies and promoted to power new, younger, and better-educated technocrats. They sought to curb PLA influence by retiring senior commanders and reducing personnel numbers from 4.2 million to 3 million. The economy was modernized by extending market incentives and local autonomy, and by encouraging foreign trade and investment.

The emergence of the pro-democracy movement
These economic reforms met with substantial success in the agricultural sector (output more than doubled 1978–85) but had adverse side effects, widening regional and social income differentials and fuelling a mass consumerism that created balance-of-payments problems. Contact with the West brought demands for full-scale democratization in China. These calls led in 1986 to widespread student demonstrations, and party chief Hu Yaobang was dismissed in 1987 for failing to check the disturbances. Hu's departure imperilled the post-Dengist reform programme, as conservative forces, grouped around the veteran Politburo members Chen Yun and Peng Zhen, sought to halt the changes and reestablish central party control. Chen Yun, Peng Zhen, and Deng Xiaoping all retired from the Politburo in October 1987, and soon after Li Peng took over as prime minister, Zhao Ziyang having become CCP chair.

The Tiananmen Square massacre
With inflation spiralling, an austerity budget was introduced in 1989. This provoked urban unrest and a student-led pro-democracy movement, launched in Beijing, rapidly spread to provincial cities. There were mass demonstrations during Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to China in May 1989. Soon after Gorbachev's departure, a brutal crackdown was launched against the demonstrators by Li Peng and President Yang Shangkun, with Deng Xiaoping's support. Martial law was proclaimed and in June 1989 more than 2,000 unarmed protesters were massacred by army troops in the capital's Tiananmen Square. Arrests, executions, martial law, and expulsion of foreign correspondents brought international condemnation and economic sanctions.

Return to conservatism
After the massacre, Communist Party general secretary Zhao Ziyang was ousted and replaced by Jiang Zemin (the Shanghai party chief and new protégé of Deng Xiaoping), a move that consolidated the power of the hardline faction of President Yang Shangkun and Li Peng. Deng officially retired from the last of his party and army posts but remained a dominant figure. A crackdown on dissidents was launched as the pendulum swung sharply away from reform towards conservatism. Jiang Zemin replaced Yang Shangkun as state president in 1993. By the summer of 1995 there was increasing concern over the failing health of Deng Xiaoping, whose reign as ‘paramount leader’ appeared to be nearing an end. In December 1995 Wei Jingsheng, a leading pro-democracy campaigner, was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment for criticizing the government and calling for independence for Tibet.

By 1992 China's economy, after stalling in 1989–90, began to expand again, with a significant increase in industrial output, as the country entered a new phase of economic reform. In 1993 it grew by 13% and in 1994 by a further 9%. In March 1996 Li Peng announced to parliament that China's GDP had quadrupled between 1980 and 1995. The USA renewed the country's most-favoured-nation (MFN) trade status in May 1996.

Death of Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping died in February 1997 at the age of 92. He had been the country's leader since 1978 and was a promoter of market economic reforms and the ‘opening to the West’, which led to a trebling in per-capita incomes as the economy grew at 9% per annum. Afflicted with Parkinson's disease and barely able to walk or talk, Deng had not been seen in public for two years.

Effective power had already passed to a collective leadership headed by Deng's chosen successor, Jiang Zemin, state president and Communist Party leader. It also included Li Peng, the prime minister, who was more conservative, Qiao Shi, head of the National People's Congress and former security chief, and Zhu Rongji, the deputy prime minister who was committed to economic modernization. Little change in the existing direction, which involved combining economic reforms with strict political control by the Communist Party, was expected in the short term.

Foreign affairs in the 1980s and 1990s
In the 1980s there was a partial rapprochement with the USSR, culminating in Mikhail Gorbachev's visit in May 1989. However, a new rift became evident in 1990, when the Chinese government denounced the Soviet leader's ‘revisionism’. However, Jiang Zemin visited the USSR in May 1991 for talks with Gorbachev, the first visit to the USSR of a CCP leader since 1957, and an agreement on the demarcation of the Sino-Soviet border was signed.

In April 1997 closer relations with Russia were established when a joint declaration was signed in Moscow opposing the world domination of one superpower (the United States) following the end of the Cold War. In November Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin signed an agreement to implement the 1991 Sino-Soviet border agreement.

Relations with Vietnam, a close ally of the Soviet Union, had been poor, especially following China's military incursion into Vietnam in February–March 1979 to punish Vietnam for its treatment of its ethnic Chinese population. But in November 1991 Vietnam's Communist Party leader and prime minister visited Beijing, after which relations were normalized and a trade agreement was signed.

Relations with the much of the West were warm, with economic contacts widening. China used its UN Security Council vote to back much of the policy of the US-led anti-Iraq alliance during the Gulf crisis of 1990–91, although it abstained in the vote authorizing the war. In 1991 Japan and the European Community dropped most of the sanctions imposed in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre. In September 1991 British prime minister John Major became the first Western leader to pay an official visit to China since 1989. In 1992 China established full diplomatic relations with Israel, and Beijing received the first-ever state visit by a Japanese emperor. In November 1998 Jiang Zemin became the first Chinese head of government to make a state visit to Japan; the host country conveyed its ‘deep remorse’ for atrocities committed in China in the 1930s and 1940s.

In contrast, relations with the USA remained strained, officially because of China's poor human-rights record and its indiscriminate sale of weapons technologies around the world. In May 1996 Liu Gang, one of the leaders of the 1989 pro-democracy uprising in Tiananmen Square and the government's third most-wanted political dissident, escaped to the USA.

In January 1996, Li Peng declared that reunification with Taiwan would become a priority once Hong Kong and Macau were returned to China in 1997 and 1999 respectively. A Hong Kong takeover panel was appointed in February 1996, and the former British colony was handed back to China in July 1997.

Separatist violence
Three bombs placed on buses in Urumqi in February 1997 killed nine people and injured 74. The bombs, timed to go off following Deng Xiaoping's memorial ceremony in Beijing, were assumed to be the work of separatist Muslim forces. Policing in Xinjiang province had been stepped up in early February after anti-Chinese riots in Yining City in which ten people were killed and more than 100 injured when Chinese soldiers opened fire on demonstrators. Another bomb exploded in March on a bus in one of Beijing's main shopping streets during the rush hour, reportedly killing two people and injuring 30. Exiled Uighur separatists claimed responsibility for the bomb, and vowed to stage more attacks until they had gained complete freedom for Xinjiang. Xinjiang is home to China's biggest concentration of Muslims – mostly Uighurs, but also Kazakhs, Kirzhis, and Hui – and for decades China had been unable to quell outbursts of violent separatist activity.

Leadership shake-up
The 15th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party closed in September 1997 with the retirement of several Deng-era leaders, underlining the commanding position secured by party leader and state president Jiang Zemin. Qiao Shi, the head of the NPC and widely viewed as an important rival to Jiang, and a perceived liberal who had helped rebuild the rule of law, stepped down from the party's Central Committee and Politburo. In March 1998 he was replaced by the more hardline Li Peng, who was due to retire as prime minister. The 69-year-old deputy prime minister, Zhu Rongji, an economic reformer who had defused pro-democracy demonstrations in Shanghai in 1989 without resorting to force, moved to third place in the CP hierarchy and was elected to succeed Li Peng as prime minister. Jiang Zemin was reelected as president; the 55-year-old Hu Jintao was elected vice-president.

Improved relations with USA and Russia
In September 1997 urban unemployment was officially reported to have reached 4%. In October President Jiang visited the USA for the first Chinese-American summit since 1985. It marked an improvement in relations, which had been strained since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. President Clinton lifted a ban on the export of non-military nuclear reactors to China. In November 1997, during a visit to China by Russian president Boris Yeltsin, a joint declaration was signed on the basis of a May 1991 agreement, ending years of tension over the demarcation of the eastern sector of the Chinese border.

Downsizing of military and bureaucracy
It was announced at the September 1997 Congress that the 3-million-strong Chinese army, air force, and navy (the People's Liberation Army) would be modernized and also reduced by 0.5 million over the coming three years. In March 1998 the NPC approved an overhaul of the state bureaucracy, entailing scrapping or merging 15 of the government's 40 ministries and departments, creating four new ‘super ministries’, and sacking half of the 8 million staff.

Dissidents released
In November 1997 the prominent pro-democracy dissident, Wei Jingsheng, was released from prison on medical parole after 18 years of intermittent internment; he immediately went to the USA for treatment for hypertension. In April 1998, Wang Dan, a leader of the dissident student protest movement in 1989, was released from prison on medical grounds and allowed to leave for the USA.

Zhu Rongji as prime minister
Zhu Rongji was voted China's new prime minister in March 1998, winning 98% of the delegates' votes in the National People's Congress. Zhu's election came as no surprise, but marked what many believed could be a new era in Chinese politics. He announced that he would serve only one term, and should therefore be able to drive through his ambitious reform plans without needing to be overly wary of making enemies. Zhu stated that he planned savage cuts in China's bloated bureaucracy and intended to overhaul loss-making state enterprises. Millions of state jobs would go during his five-year term.

Human rights
For the first time since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, China did not face a motion condemning the country's record at the 1998 meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission. Following in the footsteps of the EU, the USA decided not to sponsor an anti-China resolution, citing improvements in human rights on the mainland. Washington's decision had been bolstered by Beijing's announcement that China intended to sign the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

In December 1998, the dissident Xu Wenli was sentenced to 13-years' imprisonment for ‘attempting to overthrow the state,’ after trying to set up China's first opposition party, the Chinese Democratic Party. Xu had already spent ten years in jail for participating in the 1978–79 Democracy Wall movement.

Dissidents in China in early January 1999 formed an independent labour party, the Chinese Labour Party. Previously, the Communist Party rulers had imprisoned leaders of another would-be opposition group, the China Democracy Party, in its most severe suppression of dissent in three years.

Chinese authorities prepared for the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square killings by blocking access to some Internet sites and closing some foreign television channels. In an unprecedented legal action, an underground network of families who lost relatives in the 1989 massacre submitted evidence to a Chinese court demanding a criminal investigation into the role played by troops and officials. While the action's chances of success in Beijing were slim, the organization would pledge simultaneously to champion it in the international courts. While security forces on the Chinese mainland ensured there would be no mass gathering to commemorate the Tiananmen anniversary on 4 June, officials in Hong Kong did nothing to stop the traditional rally marking the event.

Status of Macau
In May 1998 a Preparatory Committee for the Establishment of the Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) was formed. It comprised representatives from China and Macau and would oversee the transfer of sovereignty. By this date, nearly four-fifths of ‘leading and directing’ posts in the Macau civil service were held by local, as opposed to Portuguese-expatriate, officials. In December 1998 the Preparatory Committee agreed procedures for the establishment of a 200-member Nomination Committee, to elect members of the territory's first government after its handover to China in December 1999.

Economic crisis
Amidst a global economic crisis in the region, it was revealed in December 1998 that Guangdong Enterprises, the Chinese government's holding company for businesses in the province, had debts of almost $3 billion. This raised fears that China might default on some of its debts or make Western investments worth far less by devaluing the currency. In December 1998 the government announced that the economy had grown by 7.8% during 1998.

In February 1999, in an endorsement of the market economy, it was announced that the constitution would be amended to add the ideas of the late Deng Xiaoping to its state ideology of ‘Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought’. In July 1999 it was announced that the country had developed a neutron bomb, and in September 1999 Hu Jintao, the current vice-president, was appointed vice-chair of the Central Military Commission (CMC), which oversees China's armed forces. In November 1999 after 13 years of discussion, a deal was reached to allow foreign firms access to China's markets, in exchange for China's entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO). In May 2000 a US bill gave China permanent trade status with the USA, and represented another step on the path to China's inclusion in the WTO.

Falun Gong
In July 1999, China banned the Falun Gong (‘Wheel of Law’), a spiritual movement founded in 1992 that preached salvation from an immoral world and practised a form of martial arts and meditation known as qigong. The ban followed a silent vigil in Beijing in April, by 10,000 members of the movement in protest against what they claimed was official harassment. The government claimed the Falun Gong cheated people and threatened social chaos, and later characterized it as an ‘evil cult’. It had become increasingly alarmed at the group's tight organization and the large number of Chinese officials, intellectuals, and party members – up to 700,000 – who had become involved.

The ensuing crackdown, condemned by human rights groups, involved burning the books of the Falun Gong's founder, Li Hongzhi, who was accused of plotting to overthrow the Communist Party, and exposing members. In October 1999, Falun Gong members were arrested after protesting in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, but continued their campaign of civil disobedience.

In April 2000, China succeeded in preventing a UN vote on a US-backed motion condemning Beijing for suppressing religion and crushing dissent. The same month saw further protests and arrests. In early October 2000, members of the Falun Gong demonstrated on the anniversary of China's Communist revolution, and more than 300 were beaten and arrested. In December a further 700 members were arrested. In January 2001, five members doused themselves with petrol and set themselves ablaze in Tiananmen Square; one woman died. The government broadcast graphic footage of the protest as part of its media campaign to legitimate its crackdown on the group.

Crackdown on corruption
A government crackdown against internal corruption began in July 2000, with the execution of Cheng Kehie, a former deputy chairman of the National People's Congress who was convicted of taking bribes worth US$5 million, and was the most senior official to be executed since the Communists came into power in 1949. Human rights group Amnesty International reported in February 2000 that in 1998 China had executed 1,769 people, more than the rest of the world combined, for crimes that included drunk driving and tax fraud. In July, the presidents of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan met in Dushanbe, Tajikistan to pledge cooperation in fighting terrorism, religious extremism, and drug trafficking.

The boldest strike against corruption came in September 2000, when the government executed for bribery Cheng Kejie, a former deputy chairman of the National People's Congress, and arrested the country's former second-ranked policeman for dishonesty. The cases coincided with the trials of at least 200 officials accused of evading tariffs on the importing of US$6.6 billion worth of cars, other luxury goods, and raw materials. The first verdicts in November resulted in 14 people being sentenced to death.

In a crackdown on religion in December, the authorities closed 450 unauthorized churches, destroying 210 of them.

Military spending
In March 2001, the Chinese government announced military spending plans of US$17 billion over the next year, an annual increase of 18%. The announcement followed a warning from China to the USA not to sell advanced weapons to Taiwan. The USA said it would continue to sell Taiwan enough weapons to defend itself.

Explosions
An explosion in a school in Fanglin, eastern China, killed 41 people, many of them children, in March 2001. The cause was not confirmed, and the government denied local reports that it was an accident with fireworks being made by the children to raise money for the school. Later in the month, four explosions occurred in the northern city of Shijiazhuang, destroying residential blocks and killing at least 108 people. A man was arrested the following week, and reportedly confessed to the explosions, citing personal revenge against some of the residents of the blocks. However, there was concern that he was being made a scapegoat, and the explosions may have been the work of disgruntled factory workers who had caused explosions in the past. More than one million textile workers had lost their jobs since the late 1990s.

US spy plane crisis
A US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet collided in mid-air on 1 April 2001. The fighter crashed and the pilot was killed, while the US EP-3 surveillance plane was forced to make an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island. It was not resolved who was at fault: the Chinese demanded an apology and an explanation, while the USA demanded the return of the plane and its 24 crew members. The apology and subsequent release of the crew occurred on 11 April, but China did not return the US$80 million plane. The crisis was finally resolved on 24 May, when China accepted US proposals to dismantle the plane and fly it out of the country in crates. China had insisted that allowing the plane to be flown out of the country would be regarded as a national humiliation.

Tense relations with USA
Diplomatic tensions with the US government, already strained by the spy plane crisis, were further damaged by visits by the Dalai Lama and Chen Shui-bian, the president of Taiwan, to the White House in late May 2001. China protested that the USA was interfering in its domestic affairs.

2000 census
Results from the national census, carried out in November 2000, were published in June. The population of mainland China and Taiwan had grown by 132 million since 1990, to a total of 1.26 billion.

China carried out 2,468 documented judicial executions in 2001, about three-quarters of the world's total, according to a report by Amnesty International released in April 2002. The crackdown on crime had led to more than 1,700 people being put to death between April and June 2001 alone.

Membership of the WTO
In September 2001, China secured a groundbreaking deal on its membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO), opening the country to unprecedented economic cooperation with capitalism. China had agreed to cut tariffs from 21% to an overall average of 8% and eliminate subsidies for farmers and state-owned enterprises. The agreement ended 15 years of negotiations between the Chinese and the 142-nation WTO. It provided for Chinese entry by the end of 2001, and set a strict timetable to open the country's economy. In March 2002, the National People's Congress was informed that welfare spending would have to increase by 28% to combat the effects of unemployment caused by WTO membership.