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Founding Ceremony of the PRC (1949)

On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic from Tiananmen. After three years of civil war, the CCP defeated the KMT and established one-party rule. 300,000 attended; 54 guns fired 28 salvos.

Time

3:00 PM, October 1, 1949

Place

Tiananmen Square, Beijing

Key figures

Mao Zedong (proclaimed); Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Lin Boqu; 662 CPPCC delegates

Background: civil war and preparations

After 1945, civil war erupted. The three great campaigns of 1948 (Liaoshen, Huaihai, Pingjin) destroyed KMT main forces. In April 1949 the PLA crossed the Yangtze; Nanjing fell; by October most of China was under CCP control.

In May 1948 the CCP's "May Day slogans" called for a Political Consultative Conference. September 21–30, 1949, the First CPPCC Plenary Session met in Beiping: 662 delegates adopted the Common Program, elected the Central People's Government Council, and settled the flag, anthem, capital and calendar.

Detailed timeline

2:00 PM, October 1, 1949: The Central People's Government Council met at Qinzheng Hall, electing Mao Zedong chairman.

3:00 PM: The ceremony began. From Tiananmen rostrum Mao proclaimed to the world: "The Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China is established today!" Fifty-four guns fired 28 salvos (for 28 years of revolution).

Afterward: A grand military parade and mass procession — 16,000 troops reviewed, 300,000 marchers, lasting until 9 PM. Fireworks lit the Square that night.

Founding institutions

Common Program: acted as provisional constitution, stipulating "people's democratic dictatorship." Flag: five-star red flag. Anthem: "March of the Volunteers" (provisional). Capital: Beiping renamed Beijing. Calendar: Common Era adopted.

Under the Central People's Government stood the State Council, the People's Revolutionary Military Council, the Supreme People's Court and Procuratorate. But real power always lay with the CCP — "the Party leads everything" was established from day one.

Figures

Impact

Dawn of one-party rule. The ceremony marked the start of 75 years (and counting) of absolute CCP power — no free national election ever held.

"Leaning to one side." Mao's pro-Soviet tilt locked China into the Cold War, isolated from the West for nearly 30 years.

Unfinished civil war. The KMT retreated to Taiwan; cross-strait division endures. The "national unification" left incomplete became the Taiwan issue's origin.

The war was not over in the autumn of 1949

The three great campaigns of the civil war's final phase need their counting rules stated, because the headline figures are often misread. The Liaoshen Campaign, fought from 12 September to 2 November 1948 over 52 days, cost the Northeastern Field Army some 69,000 casualties and accounted for more than 470,000 Nationalist troops killed, wounded, captured or won over by defection. The Huaihai Campaign, from 6 November 1948 to 10 January 1949, committed about 600,000 Communist troops against the main Nationalist armies in the Central Plain and eliminated some 555,000 of them. The Pingjin Campaign, from 29 November 1948 to 31 January 1949, ended differently: Fu Zuoyi accepted a negotiated reorganization of his command, Beiping changed hands without being stormed, and roughly 520,000 Nationalist troops were destroyed, reorganized or brought over. Chinese official military histories present these as combined totals. They are not battlefield body counts, and any archive page that repeats them without that qualification misleads its readers.

Peace talks between the Nationalists and Communists collapsed on 20 April 1949. That night and the next, the Second and Third Field Armies forced a crossing of the Yangtze on a broad front running from Jiangyin in Jiangsu to Hukou in Jiangxi, and on 23 April Nanjing, the Nationalist capital, fell. The Nationalist government withdrew first to Guangzhou, then, as the pursuit continued, to Chongqing and Chengdu, and finally, in December 1949, to Taipei. Shanghai fell on 27 May. Xinjiang changed hands by negotiation in late September. Guangzhou was taken on 14 October, Chongqing on 30 November and Chengdu on 27 December. The pattern matters for understanding the founding ceremony itself: on the day Mao stood on Tiananmen, Communist armies were still advancing across the south and southwest, and the Southwest Campaign that closed out major mainland operations had not yet begun.

The territory actually administered from Beijing on 1 October was substantially smaller than the map the new state claimed. Hainan Island remained under the Nationalist general Xue Yue until the Hainan campaign of March to May 1950, a combined amphibious and guerrilla operation that finally took the island in the spring of the new state's second year. The Zhoushan archipelago off Zhejiang was held by Nationalist forces until May 1950, when they evacuated to Taiwan and Communist troops took possession without a final battle. Tibet was governed by the Kashag in Lhasa and recognized no administration from Beijing; only after the Chamdo campaign of October 1950, in which the Tibetan army was destroyed in eastern Tibet, did negotiations produce the Seventeen-Point Agreement of 23 May 1951 and the entry of PLA troops into Lhasa later that year. Hong Kong remained a British colony and Macau a Portuguese-administered territory, neither of them on the founding agenda. Taiwan, with the Penghu Islands, Kinmen and Matsu, was held by the relocated Republic of China government and remains outside Beijing's control today. “Liberation of the whole country,” in other words, was a process completed piecemeal over 1950 and 1951, and in the case of Taiwan never completed. The first of October 1949 was the date of a proclamation and a ceremony, not the end of the war.

Preparing the CPPCC: who was in the hall

The political machinery that produced the new state had been assembled in public view over the preceding seventeen months. On 30 April 1948 the CCP Central Committee issued its May Day Slogans, twenty-three articles in all, the fifth of which called on the democratic parties, the people's organizations and public figures of all walks of life to convene a political consultative conference, discuss and bring about a people's congress, and establish a democratic coalition government. The invitation was aimed in particular at the non-Communist parties then being suppressed in Nationalist territory, above all the China Democratic League. Through late 1948 and the first half of 1949, underground Party organizations arranged for prominent non-Communist figures to travel north, many of them by sea from Hong Kong, into the liberated areas. In January 1949 fifty-five of them, including Li Jishen, Shen Junru, Ma Xulun and Guo Moruo, published a joint statement on the situation accepting the leadership of the Communist Party. That acceptance, given before any government existed, set the terms on which the coalition would be built.

A preparatory meeting for the new conference sat at Zhongnanhai in Beiping from 15 to 19 June 1949, with 134 participants. It elected a standing committee of twenty-one headed by Mao and created six working groups responsible respectively for the list of participating units, the draft Common Program, the organic law of the government, the draft declaration, the designs for flag, emblem and anthem together with the choice of capital and calendar, and the grouping and photographing of delegates. Zhou Enlai supervised the drafting of the Common Program through the summer, and the text went through repeated revisions, including a late change of title, before it reached the plenary session in September.

The First Plenary Session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference met at Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai from 21 to 30 September 1949. Forty-five units took part. There were 510 full delegates, 77 alternate delegates and 75 specially invited delegates, 662 people in total, drawn from the Communist Party, the democratic parties, non-party public figures, the People's Liberation Army, regional and mass organizations, and overseas Chinese communities. None of them had been chosen by popular vote. Every delegate owed his or her seat to nomination by a participating unit and to negotiation among those units, a method the conference made no attempt to disguise. It was in his opening address on 21 September, and not from Tiananmen ten days later, that Mao delivered the sentence by which the founding is now remembered in China, declaring that the Chinese people had stood up. The session closed on 30 September by electing Mao chairman of the Central People's Government, with Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, Soong Ching-ling, Li Jishen, Zhang Lan and Gao Gang as vice-chairmen, and a Central People's Government Council of fifty-six members. The next afternoon that council met, and the ceremony followed.

The Common Program and the state symbols, item by item

The Common Program of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, adopted on 29 September 1949, ran to seven chapters and sixty articles and served as the state's provisional constitution. Its first article defined the People's Republic as a state of people's democratic dictatorship, led by the working class, based on the alliance of workers and peasants, and uniting all democratic classes and all nationalities. The economic chapters told a more complicated story than later propaganda suggests. Private property was protected. National industry and commerce were protected. Economic policy was stated in the formula of benefit to both public and private interests and benefit to both labour and capital, and the program contemplated a long period in which capitalist enterprise would continue under state guidance. Readers who know only the socialist transformation of 1953 to 1956, in which private industry and commerce were absorbed altogether, are often surprised by the text of 1949. The program's provisional-constitution role ended in September 1954, when the first National People's Congress adopted a formal constitution, but the document remains the clearest single statement of what the founders publicly promised before power was consolidated.

The national symbols were settled in the same week, and the details repay recording. The flag came out of an open competition announced by the preparatory committee in July 1949, which drew 1,920 designs within about a month. The entry by Zeng Liansong, a clerk in Shanghai, was adopted with modifications: a large star for the Communist Party, four small stars for the four classes of the united front — workers, peasants, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie — and, in a change from Zeng's original, a plain large star with the hammer and sickle he had placed on it removed. The plenary session approved the five-star red flag on 27 September. The anthem was not newly composed at all. On the same day the session voted to take the “March of the Volunteers,” written in 1935 by Tian Han and Nie Er as the theme of the film Children of Troubled Times, as the provisional national anthem with its words unchanged. Some delegates proposed deleting the line about the Chinese nation facing its moment of greatest peril, on the grounds that the war had been won. Zhou Enlai argued that the original words should be kept precisely as a warning against complacency, Mao agreed, and the resolution passed on that basis. The words were in fact replaced by a collectively written text in 1978 and restored in 1982, and the song was written into the constitution as the national anthem in 2004.

Two further resolutions of 27 September fixed the capital and the calendar: Beiping would be the capital and would resume its older name of Beijing, and the state would use the Common Era, counting 1949 as 1949. On 30 September, its last day, the session voted to erect a Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square. That evening a foundation ceremony was held on the square, at which Mao read the inscription text and turned the first earth with a spade. The monument itself was built between 1952 and 1958. Taken together, the week's decisions show a leadership attentive to symbolism in a literal sense: a flag explained star by star, an anthem kept deliberately alarming, a capital renamed, a calendar replaced, and a monument founded before the government it commemorated had held its first meeting.

1 October, hour by hour

On the morning of 1 October 1949, crowds organized by work unit, school and neighbourhood were already moving toward Tiananmen Square. At 2 p.m. the Central People's Government Council held its first meeting at Qinzheng Hall in Zhongnanhai. It resolved unanimously to accept the Common Program as the government's platform, appointed Zhou Enlai premier of the Government Administration Council and concurrently minister of foreign affairs, appointed Mao chairman of the People's Revolutionary Military Council, and appointed Zhu De commander-in-chief of the People's Liberation Army. The councillors then drove the short distance to Tiananmen, where the gate tower had been prepared with a rostrum, microphones and loudspeakers carrying the proceedings across the square and, by radio, across the country.

At 3 p.m. Lin Boqu, secretary-general of the Central People's Government, opened the ceremony and called on Mao to speak. Mao read the Proclamation of the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China, whose operative sentence declared that the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China was established that day. An archive page has a duty to separate that documented text from the folklore that has gathered around it. The declaration that the Chinese people had stood up belongs to the CPPCC opening address of 21 September. The full text of the 1 October proclamation was printed in the People's Daily of 2 October 1949 and is preserved in the official documentary collections, and it is that text, not the many re-edited audio clips in circulation, that constitutes the record. Mao then pressed a button on the rostrum that raised the first five-star red flag on the new flagpole in the square, the military band played the “March of the Volunteers,” and fifty-four artillery pieces fired twenty-eight salvos. The numbers had been fixed during the preparations: fifty-four for the units represented at the CPPCC, twenty-eight for the years of the Party's history from 1921 to 1949.

A military parade followed, reviewed by Zhu De as commander, with Nie Rongzhen as parade director. More than 16,400 troops took part, infantry, cavalry, artillery and armoured units together with naval and air force contingents, marching eastward along Chang'an Avenue past the rostrum. The air element numbered only seventeen aircraft, among them nine American-built P-51 fighters which, unusually for a ceremonial flypast, carried live ammunition, because the air force was simultaneously responsible for the air defence of the capital. With so few aircraft available, Zhou Enlai proposed that part of the formation circle round and pass over the square a second time; the result was twenty-six observed passes, a piece of stage management recorded in the memoirs of several participants. The parade gave way to a mass procession of workers, peasants, students and city residents carrying flags, portraits and paper flowers, which continued until about 9 p.m. Fireworks over the square closed the day.

Diplomatic recognition began the following morning. On 2 October the Soviet foreign minister, Andrey Vyshinsky, cabled Zhou Enlai that the Soviet Union recognized the People's Republic and wished to establish diplomatic relations, making the USSR the first state to do so. Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and North Korea followed within the first week of October, and the pattern of recognition through 1949 and 1950 ran almost exactly along the lines of the Cold War. The United States, which had maintained contacts with the Communists during the civil war, withheld recognition, and the two countries entered three decades of estrangement broken only in 1971 and 1972. Britain recognized the PRC on 6 January 1950, earlier than any other major Western power, though full ambassadorial relations were not established until 1972. China's seat at the United Nations remained with the Republic of China government on Taiwan until General Assembly Resolution 2758 transferred it to Beijing in October 1971, twenty-two years after the proclamation.

What followed immediately

The administrative build-out of the new state can be dated almost day by day. On 9 October 1949 the First National Committee of the CPPCC elected Mao its chairman. On 19 October the Central People's Government Council appointed the heads of its ministries and commissions. The Government Administration Council was formally established on 21 October, and the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate followed in November. Below the centre, the wartime liberated-area governments were folded into five great administrative regions, the Northeast, East China, Central-South, Northwest and Southwest, each with its own military and administrative committee or people's government, an intermediate tier between Beijing and the provinces that survived until 1954.

Military operations continued without a pause. In October 1949 Communist forces pursued Bai Chongxi's Guangxi armies through Guangdong and Guangxi. From 25 to 27 October the Battle of Guningtou on Kinmen, the island group within artillery range of Xiamen, destroyed a PLA landing force of more than 9,000 men almost to the last man. It was one of the worst defeats the Communists suffered in the entire war, and its consequence was permanent: no serious attempt to take Kinmen or Taiwan followed, and the cross-Strait confrontation settled into the shape it retains today. The Southwest Campaign of November and December 1949 eliminated the last major Nationalist armies on the mainland. Within the new state's first year the Korean War transformed its position again: war broke out in June 1950, and in October 1950 Chinese troops, styled People's Volunteers, crossed the Yalu. On the domestic front 1950 opened three simultaneous campaigns, land reform in the newly liberated areas, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, and the Resist-America-Aid-Korea mobilization, each of which is documented in its own archive page on this site.

One feature of the 1949 settlement distinguished it from what followed, and it is worth stating precisely. The government proclaimed on 1 October was, in form, a coalition. The vice-chairmen included the non-Communist figures Soong Ching-ling, Li Jishen and Zhang Lan. The vice-premiers of the Government Administration Council included Huang Yanpei of the China Democratic National Construction Association alongside Guo Moruo, Chen Yi and Dong Biwu, and non-Communists held a scattering of ministerial and vice-ministerial posts. The form did not survive consolidation. The Common Program yielded to the constitution of 1954, the CPPCC lost its legislative functions to the National People's Congress, and through the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 the democratic parties were reduced to decoration. Supremacy of the Communist Party had been a fact from the first afternoon; the slogan that the Party leads everything was codified in stages, through Mao's campaign against “dispersalism” in 1953 and the formula's entrenchment in Party usage around the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference of 1962. The distance between the coalition proclaimed in 1949 and the system that replaced it within a decade is part of the record of the founding, not a footnote to it.

Commemoration, narrative and the state of the record

National Day itself was created by resolution on 2 December 1949, when the Central People's Government Council fixed 1 October as the annual anniversary. Military parades were held on the day every year from 1950 to 1959, then at longer intervals under the later formula of smaller celebrations every five years and major ones every ten, with large-scale parades in 1984, 1999, 2009 and 2019. The visual record of 1949 rests chiefly on the documentary film shot by the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio, with Soviet cameramen assisting on the colour sequences. Part of that colour stock was destroyed in a fire at the studio in November 1949, and the colour footage in circulation today is the product of salvage and restoration, according to the studio's own published accounts. The frequently reproduced oil painting of the proclamation, by Dong Xiwen, was painted in 1953 and repainted more than once as leaders fell from favour, Gao Gang and later Liu Shaoqi being painted out in successive versions — a small, well-documented example of how the founding image was edited to fit later politics.

Attendance at the ceremony is conventionally given as 300,000 soldiers and civilians, the figure used in official accounts and reproduced, labelled as the official figure, in this page's table. No independent count exists. Researchers working on 1949 face a more general problem: the central archives for the founding period, including the CPPCC preparatory records, have never been systematically opened. The published record consists of officially compiled documentary collections, the chronological biographies of the leaders, and the diaries and memoirs of participants, which agree on the sequence of decisions and differ, sometimes sharply, on motives and on who proposed what. An archive page can do its work honestly within those limits by keeping three things on one timeline — the ceremony in the square, the documents adopted in the week before it, and the war still being fought beyond the capital — and by labelling every figure with the mouth it came from. Remove any one of the three, and the first of October 1949 becomes what it is in the posters: a single raised hand, a flag, and nothing before or after.

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