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Qiu Heng: Difference between revisions
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Despite the clearly tilted electoral campaign, Qiu Heng enjoyed geniune popularity with the population for his wartime achievements, his role in overthrowing an unpopular monarchy and his penchant for curbing and publicly punishing the excesses of other military officials. In one such instance he demoted a general to the rank of private for proposing that farmers protesting against the building of a railroad through their lands should simply be mowed down with machine guns; the dressing down and demotion was televised. Despite his reserved personality, he actively promoted his public persona as the 'People's General' with working tours of the countryside, visits to factories, children's nurseries and schools; polls of the time giving him a seventy percent preference of the vote may have been skewed but their trajectory was nonetheless true, his advantage over his rivals was an insurmountable chasm. The May 1952 polls resulted in an overwhelming victory for him; the NRF and Qiu Heng won with 73% of the vote, the Liberals won 13%, the Communists won 9% and the Peasant and Farmers Party won 5%. The NRF and the army could comfortably rule alone and had pushed the opposition to the margins of political representation, the Peasant and Farmers Party soon after decided to merge with the NRF arguing their objectives were better served as part of the governing party. The 1952 election was a watershed in the politics of [[Daxia]], it marked the beginning of an almost uninterrupted thirty four year period of rule for the NRF, its percentage in national elections would not dip under eighty percent until 1984 when Yang Qiu secured 'merely' sixty nine percent of the vote during his reelection campaign. | Despite the clearly tilted electoral campaign, Qiu Heng enjoyed geniune popularity with the population for his wartime achievements, his role in overthrowing an unpopular monarchy and his penchant for curbing and publicly punishing the excesses of other military officials. In one such instance he demoted a general to the rank of private for proposing that farmers protesting against the building of a railroad through their lands should simply be mowed down with machine guns; the dressing down and demotion was televised. Despite his reserved personality, he actively promoted his public persona as the 'People's General' with working tours of the countryside, visits to factories, children's nurseries and schools; polls of the time giving him a seventy percent preference of the vote may have been skewed but their trajectory was nonetheless true, his advantage over his rivals was an insurmountable chasm. The May 1952 polls resulted in an overwhelming victory for him; the NRF and Qiu Heng won with 73% of the vote, the Liberals won 13%, the Communists won 9% and the Peasant and Farmers Party won 5%. The NRF and the army could comfortably rule alone and had pushed the opposition to the margins of political representation, the Peasant and Farmers Party soon after decided to merge with the NRF arguing their objectives were better served as part of the governing party. The 1952 election was a watershed in the politics of [[Daxia]], it marked the beginning of an almost uninterrupted thirty four year period of rule for the NRF, its percentage in national elections would not dip under eighty percent until 1984 when Yang Qiu secured 'merely' sixty nine percent of the vote during his reelection campaign. | ||
===Persecution of communists=== | ===Persecution of communists=== | ||
The new President and the military establishment despite allowing it to run in elections, still saw the [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]] with its radical ideas on wealth and land redistribution, world revolution and its 'massification' of the army, as its main internal enemy. With a strong public mandate secured and with the communists revealing part of their underground networks during the presidential campaign to try and amp up their political mobilization, the government organs began to take aim at them. While [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]] parliamentarians were booed and drowned out every day by the NRF majority in the National Assembly, their associates on the outside began to be arrested, assassinated and abducted in plain daylight. In the face of government repressive tactics, the [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]]'s internal consensus to participate in electoral politics began to crumble and the party withdrew entirely from the Assembly a year before the 1956 election to 'pursue the interests of the people in other fronts', an euphemism for armed struggle. The struggle to rebuild an exhausted organization bled dry by killings and arrests during its three year dalliance with electoral politics was to be a fraught one, the [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]] would not be a serious foe at all during all of Qiu Heng's three presidential terms. The party mostly fled the cities other than its birthplace of [[Khov]], preferring to concentrate its cadres in hidden bases in rural locales and this mostly in the far west of the country. | The new President and the military establishment despite allowing it to run in elections, still saw the [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]] with its radical ideas on wealth and land redistribution, world revolution and its 'massification' of the army, as its main internal enemy. With a strong public mandate secured and with the communists revealing part of their underground networks during the presidential campaign to try and amp up their political mobilization, the government organs began to take aim at them. While [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]] parliamentarians were booed and drowned out every day by the NRF majority in the National Assembly, their associates on the outside began to be arrested, assassinated and abducted in plain daylight. In the face of government repressive tactics, the [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]]'s internal consensus to participate in electoral politics began to crumble and the party withdrew entirely from the Assembly a year before the 1956 election to 'pursue the interests of the people in other fronts', an euphemism for armed struggle. The struggle to rebuild an exhausted organization bled dry by killings and arrests during its three year dalliance with electoral politics was to be a fraught one, the [[Communist Party of Daxia|CPD]] would not be a serious foe at all during all of Qiu Heng's three presidential terms. The party mostly fled the cities other than its birthplace of [[Khov]], preferring to concentrate its cadres in hidden bases in rural locales and this mostly in the far west of the country. Most of the second genertion of communist party leaders were killed during Qiu Heng's first term and the third generation of leaders were mostly from peasant origins; the Red Peasant faction would become dominant in the 1960's and 1970's and were fairly disconnected from the industrial urban worker class. | ||
===Stabilizing | ===Stabilizing maturation=== | ||
During Qiu Heng's presidency the country saw sustained economic growth, a period known as the ''Stablizing Growth'' that was fueled by import substitution and low rates of inflation. An important factor helping the sustained growth in the period was the reduction of political turmoil, particularly around national elections, with the creation of a single, overly dominant party. Qiu Heng nationalized all of the oil fields, the railroads, the telephone companies and the ports; many of these companies had been owned by members of the Qian elites and now passed into the hands of the state which created vast and byzantine hierarchies of bureaucrats to manage these massive state companies. | |||
===The Little Incursion=== | ===The Little Incursion=== | ||
==Final years== | ==Final years== | ||