EndCCPWorld.com

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.

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.

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.

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 three campaigns need their counting rules stated. Liaoshen (12 September–2 November 1948, 52 days) cost the Northeastern Field Army some 69,000 casualties and destroyed, captured or won over more than 470,000 Nationalist troops. Huaihai (6 November 1948–10 January 1949) committed 600,000 PLA troops and eliminated 555,000 Nationalist troops. Pingjin (29 November 1948–31 January 1949) ended with Fu Zuoyi accepting reorganization and Beiping changing hands without a storming. These Chinese military-history figures combine killed and wounded, prisoners, and defectors; they are not battlefield body counts.

Peace talks collapsed on 20 April 1949. On the night of 20–21 April the Second and Third Field Armies forced the Yangtze on a front from Jiangyin to Hukou, and on 23 April Nanjing fell. The Nationalist government moved to Guangzhou, then Chongqing and Chengdu, and in December to Taipei. Shanghai fell on 27 May, Xinjiang changed hands peacefully in late September, Guangzhou on 14 October, Chongqing on 30 November and Chengdu on 27 December. When the founding ceremony was held, the pursuit south of the Yangtze was still under way.

On 1 October the new government did not control all the territory it claimed. Hainan remained under Xue Yue until the Hainan campaign of March–May 1950. The Zhoushan Islands were evacuated by Nationalist forces to Taiwan in May 1950. Tibet was still governed by the Kashag; only after the Chamdo campaign of October 1950 came the Seventeen-Point Agreement of 23 May 1951 and the PLA's entry into Lhasa. Hong Kong and Macau remained under British and Portuguese administration, and Taiwan was held by the relocated Republic of China government. “Liberation of the whole country” was a process completed piecemeal — and in the case of Taiwan never completed — not an event of 1 October 1949.

The May Day Slogans of 30 April 1948 — 23 in all — called in their fifth article for democratic parties, people's organizations and public figures to convene a political consultative conference and form a democratic coalition government. Through the first half of 1949, non-Communist political figures were brought north from Hong Kong and elsewhere by underground routes into the liberated areas; in January 1949, 55 of them, including Li Jishen, Shen Junru, Ma Xulun and Guo Moruo, had publicly accepted CCP leadership.

The preparatory meeting sat at Zhongnanhai from 15 to 19 June 1949, with 134 participants, and set up six working groups covering the delegate list, the Common Program, the government organization law, the declaration, the flag-anthem-emblem designs, and delegate administration. Zhou Enlai supervised the drafting of the Common Program, which went through repeated revisions before September.

The First Plenary Session of the CPPCC met at Huairen Hall, Zhongnanhai, from 21 to 30 September 1949: 45 participating units, 510 full delegates, 77 alternates and 75 specially invited delegates — 662 in total. No delegate had been chosen by a popular vote; all were nominated by their units through consultation. Mao's famous line that the Chinese people had “stood up” was delivered in his opening address of 21 September, not from Tiananmen on 1 October. On 30 September the session elected 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 56-member Central People's Government Council.

The Common Program, adopted on 29 September 1949, ran to seven chapters and 60 articles. Article 1 defined the state as a people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance. The same text protected private property and national industry and commerce, under the formula of “benefit to both public and private interests, benefit to both labour and capital” — language very different from the socialist transformation that followed in the 1950s. Its role as a provisional constitution ended when the National People's Congress adopted a formal constitution in September 1954.

The flag was chosen after a public competition announced in July 1949, which drew 1,920 designs within a month. Zeng Liansong's entry was adopted with modifications: one large star for the Communist Party and four small stars for the worker, peasant, petty-bourgeois and national-bourgeois classes. The hammer and sickle in his original large star were removed. The plenary session approved the five-star red flag on 27 September.

No new anthem was adopted. The session voted on 27 September to use the “March of the Volunteers” — written in 1935 by Tian Han and Nie Er for the film Children of Troubled Times — as the provisional anthem with its words unchanged. Some delegates had wanted to drop the line “the Chinese nation faces its moment of greatest peril” now that the war was won; Zhou Enlai argued for keeping it as a warning, and Mao agreed. A collectively rewritten lyric was briefly in force from 1978 until the original was restored in 1982; the song was written into the constitution as the national anthem in 2004.

The same 27 September resolutions made Beiping the capital under the restored name Beijing and adopted the Common Era calendar. On 30 September the session voted to erect the Monument to the People's Heroes, and that evening Mao read the inscription text and turned earth at the foundation ceremony in Tiananmen Square. Construction began in 1952 and the monument was unveiled in 1958.

By the morning of 1 October 1949 crowds 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 accepted the Common Program as the basis of government, appointed Zhou Enlai premier of the Government Administration Council and concurrently foreign minister, Mao chairman of the People's Revolutionary Military Council, and Zhu De commander-in-chief of the PLA. The members then drove to Tiananmen.

At 3 p.m. Lin Boqu opened the ceremony. Mao read out the Proclamation of the Central People's Government, whose operative sentence was: “The Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China is established today.” Two popular attributions need correcting against the record: the declaration that the Chinese people had “stood up” belongs to Mao's 21 September CPPCC speech, and the authoritative text of 1 October is the written proclamation preserved in the official documentary collections. Mao then pressed the button raising the first five-star flag while the band played the “March of the Volunteers” and 54 guns fired 28 salvos — 54 for the units represented at the CPPCC, 28 for the years from 1921 to 1949, symbolism fixed during the preparations.

A parade followed, with Zhu De as reviewing commander and Nie Rongzhen as parade director. More than 16,400 troops — infantry, cavalry, artillery, armour, and naval and air contingents — marched east along Chang'an Avenue. Seventeen aircraft flew over the square, nine P-51 fighters carrying live ammunition, a rarity at the time; because there were so few aircraft, Zhou Enlai proposed that some circle back and fly past a second time, producing 26 observed passes, a detail recorded in several participants' memoirs. A mass procession of workers, peasants, students and citizens then crossed the square until about 9 p.m., followed by fireworks.

The same day the new government's assumption-of-office telegram was issued and Xinhua broadcast the proclamation. On 2 October Soviet foreign minister Vyshinsky cabled Zhou Enlai: the USSR became the first state to recognize the People's Republic and establish diplomatic relations, followed within days by Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and North Korea, among others. The United States withheld recognition, beginning three decades of estrangement. Britain recognized the PRC in January 1950, earliest among the Western powers, though relations were not raised to ambassadorial level until 1972.

The administrative sequence of the first months runs in a clear line. On 9 October 1949 the CPPCC National Committee elected Mao its chairman. On 19 October the Central People's Government Council appointed ministry heads; the Government Administration Council was formally established on 21 October, and the Supreme People's Court and Supreme People's Procuratorate followed in November. The liberated-area governments were reorganized into five great administrative regions — Northeast, East, Central-South, Northwest and Southwest.

Fighting did not pause for the founding. In October the PLA pursued Bai Chongxi's forces through Guangdong and Guangxi. From 25 to 27 October the Battle of Guningtou on Kinmen destroyed a PLA landing force of more than 9,000 men — one of the Party's worst defeats of the period — and fixed the cross-Strait standoff in place. The Southwest campaign closed out major mainland operations in November and December. When the Korean War broke out in June 1950 and Chinese troops crossed the Yalu that October, the new state's military and diplomatic centre of gravity shifted to Korea within its first year. Domestically, 1950 opened land reform, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and the Resist-America-Aid-Korea mobilization simultaneously; each has its own archive page on this site.

One structural difference from what came later deserves recording. The 1949 government was nominally a coalition: vice-premiers included the non-Communist Huang Yanpei alongside Guo Moruo, Chen Yi and Dong Biwu, and non-Party figures held a number of ministerial posts. After the 1954 constitution and the first National People's Congress, the CPPCC receded into an advisory role, and by the mid-1950s non-Communists had effectively disappeared from positions of real power. Party supremacy was a fact from the first day; its codification in the formula “the Party leads everything” came in stages, through Mao's 1953 attack on “dispersalism” and the formula's fixation in Party documents around the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference of 1962.

National Day was fixed on 2 December 1949, when the Central People's Government Council resolved that 1 October would be celebrated annually. Parades were held every year from 1950 to 1959, then on a reduced rhythm — smaller celebrations every five years, major ones every ten — with large parades in 1984, 1999, 2009 and 2019. The best-known footage comes from the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio's Founding Ceremony, its colour sequences shot with Soviet cameramen's help; part of that colour stock was destroyed in a fire in November 1949, and surviving colour images are restorations, according to the studio's own published accounts.

The figure of 300,000 participants is the long-standing official figure and is labelled as such in this page's table. Circulating audio clips of Mao's remarks exist in mutually inconsistent edits; the reliable anchors are the proclamation text as printed in the People's Daily of 2 October 1949 and the newsreel record. This page quotes no on-the-spot dialogue that cannot be traced to those sources.

As for archives: the CCP Central Archives and the CPPCC preparatory records for 1949 have never been systematically opened to the public. Researchers work from officially compiled publications — the Selected Important Documents Since the Founding of the State, Mao's collected works, the chronological biography of Zhou Enlai — cross-checked against diaries and memoirs. The official narrative concentrates on emancipation, and says little about the incomplete territorial control of October 1949 or the coalition government's rapid conversion into one-party rule. This page records the ceremony, the documents and the unfinished war on a single timeline; leave out any one of the three and 1 October 1949 shrinks into a poster.

Beyond the ceremony, the harder daily work of 1949 was taking over the cities. Beiping was the model of peaceful takeover: Fu Zuoyi's troops marched out for reorganization on 31 January 1949, the PLA entered, and a military control commission and municipal government were set up under Ye Jianying. The sequence everywhere was military control first and civil government second — power stations, waterworks, police and banks taken over before schools and factories. Shanghai, taken on 27 May, received more than 2,700 bureaucrat-capital enterprises under its military control commission headed by Chen Yi. The thorniest problem was money. The Nationalists' gold-yuan notes had collapsed and were refused in the markets. The People's Bank of China had been founded at Shijiazhuang on 1 December 1948 and issued the first series of renminbi; the new authorities exchanged the new notes for gold-yuan notes and silver dollars under deadlines, and in July 1949 fought the “silver dollar battle” in Shanghai, raiding the securities building and suppressing speculation until the renminbi held. Prices were still rising at the end of 1949; real stabilization waited for the unification of national financial work in March 1950. This belongs in the founding record because it states what the salutes of 1 October did not: in its first year the new government ruled a country of inflation, mass unemployment and broken railways, and founding a state and governing it were two separate ledgers.

Tiananmen Square itself was prepared for the day. From August 1949 the city cleared and levelled the square, repaired the gate tower, hung eight great palace lanterns on it, and mounted a portrait of Mao at its centre. That portrait has been repainted repeatedly since — the 1949 version showed Mao in an octagonal cap; the now-standard image dates from 1967 — with a succession of named painters, including Zhou Lingzhao, Zhang Zhenshi and Wang Guodong, a sequence documented in the painters' own published interviews. The flagpole was designed and built by the municipal construction bureau, its base and marble balustrade finished in a rush before the ceremony. Broadcasting was handled by the Beijing Xinhua station; the announcer Ding Yilan, stationed on the rostrum, left a memoir that remains a primary source for the day's running order, including how the loudspeaker relays were laid across the square and how the recording of Mao's proclamation was made and kept. Such details look small. They are where an archive earns its name: who announced, who painted, who raised the pole — all of it has names attached, and no one need look for the founding ceremony in legend.

Two sequels bear directly on what was proclaimed on the founding day and are appended here. The first is the United Nations seat. In November 1949 and again in January 1950 Zhou Enlai cabled the UN Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly demanding the expulsion of the Nationalist delegation and the seating of the People's Republic; the Assembly deferred consideration. For more than twenty years the China representation question returned to the agenda annually — shelved in the 1950s by an American-sponsored moratorium, then protected in the 1960s by the “important question” procedure requiring a two-thirds majority — until, on 25 October 1971, Resolution 2758 passed by 76 votes to 35 with 17 abstentions, restoring all rights to the People's Republic and expelling the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek. Twenty-two years separate the proclamation of 1949 from admission to China's UN seat. The second sequel is Tibet. After the Seventeen-Point Agreement of 1951, the central government left the Kashag and the Dalai Lama's position in place for nearly eight years; after the Lhasa events of 1959 the Dalai Lama fled to India, democratic reforms were imposed in Tibet, and the agreement's framework ended. Set the four threads side by side — Hainan, Zhoushan, Tibet and the UN seat — and the pattern is plain: the state proclaimed on 1 October 1949 had most of its territorial control, its international representation and its internal arrangements settled piecemeal over the following ten to twenty years. An archive of the founding that records only the day of proclamation, and not how long the settling took or which item was never settled at all — the Taiwan question being that item — has recorded the ceremony and missed the founding.