First PRC Constitution adopted

The PRC enacted the Agrarian Reform Law, formalizing redistribution of land from landlords to rural households. It transformed property relations and expanded the new state’s reach in the countryside,...

Chinese forces crossed the Yalu River into the Korean War, confronting UN-command forces led by the United States. The intervention demonstrated the new republic’s military capacity and its...

Representatives of the PRC central government and the Tibetan government signed an agreement on Tibet’s status and governance. Beijing describes it as peaceful liberation and national unification;...

The armistice ended large-scale fighting in the Korean War without a peace treaty. China emerged as a major military actor in East Asia, though the conflict hardened Cold War divisions and contributed...

Premier Zhou Enlai and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru articulated the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in a joint statement. Their language of sovereignty, non-interference, equality,...

The PRC took the Yijiangshan Islands from the Republic of China during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis. The conflict brought the unresolved civil war into the Cold War security order and demonstrated...

Delegates from 29 Asian and African countries met in Indonesia, where China participated alongside newly independent and anti-colonial states. Bandung made decolonization, racial equality,...

Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Soviet Communist Party Congress denounced Stalin’s cult of personality. The speech contributed to ideological tensions with Beijing and the eventual...

Mao Zedong publicly advanced the formula “let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” The invitation to intellectual criticism was soon recast as a way to identify...

The first Party congress after the founding of the PRC opened in Beijing. Its program called for socialist construction and a more regularized party-state, showing how post-revolutionary sovereignty...