Great Leap Forward

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The Great Leap Forward also refers to a hypothesized stage in human evolution.

The Great Leap Forward (simplified Chinese: 大跃进; traditional Chinese: 大躍進; pinyin: Dà yuè jìn) was a campaign by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of the People's Republic of China from 1958 to early 1962 aimed at using mainland China's plentiful supply of cheap labor to rapidly industrialize the country.

Historical background

During the 1950s, the Chinese had carried out a program of land distribution coupled with industrialization under state ownership with grudging technical assistance from the Soviet Union. By the mid-1950s the situation in Mainland China had somewhat stabilized, and the immediate threat from the wars in Korea against the United States and in Vietnam against France had receded. The property of people perceived as capitalists by the new leadership had been expropriated in 1952-1953, members of the left-wing opposition imprisoned at the same time, and the remaining Kuomintang on the mainland had been eliminated. For the first time in generations, China seemed to have a strong and stable national government.

However, Mao Zedong had become alarmed by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's term since the Twentieth Congress. He perceived that far from "catching up and overtaking" the West, the Soviet economy was being allowed to fall behind. Uprisings had taken place in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the USSR was seeking "Peaceful coexistence" with what the Chinese regarded as imperialist Western powers. These policies meant for Mao that the PRC had to be prepared to "go it alone".

The Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward borrowed elements from the history of the USSR in a uniquely Chinese combination. Collectivization from the USSR's "Third Period;" Stakhanovism from the early 1930s; the "people's guards" Khrushchev had created in 1959; and the uniquely Chinese policy of establishing People's communes as relatively self-sufficient economic units, incorporating light industry and construction projects.

It was thought that through collectivization and mass labor, China's steel production would surpass that of the United Kingdom only 15 years after the start of the "leap."

An experimental commune was established in Henan early in 1958, and soon spread throughout the country. Tens of millions were mobilized to produce one commodity, symbolic of industrialisation—steel. Approximately 25,000 communes were set-up, each with around 5,000 households.

The hope was to industrialize by making use of the massive supply of cheap labor and avoid having to import heavy machinery. Small backyard steel furnaces were built in every commune while peasants produced "turds" of cast iron made out of scrap. Sometimes even factories, schools, and hospitals abandoned their work to smelt iron. The majority of this home produced iron was of extremely low quality and completely useless for any purposes. Simultaneously, the peasants were collectivized.

Outcome

The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen both within China and outside as a major economic disaster. As inflated statistics reached planning authorities, orders were given to divert human resources into industry rather than agriculture. Various sources now put the death toll somewhere between 25 and 60 million people, with the majority of the deaths owed to starvation. The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years," the Three Years of Natural Disasters (although this name is now rarely used in China), and the Great Leap Famine, as the Chinese people suffered from extreme shortages of food. It is believed by some to have been the greatest famine in history.

Droughts, floods, and general bad weather caught China completely by surprise. In July of 1959, the Yellow River flooded in East China. According to the Disaster Center[1], it directly killed, either through starvation from crop failure or drowning, an estimated 30 million people, while other areas were affected in other ways as well. It is ranked as the seventh deadliest natural disaster in the 20th century.

In 1960, at least some degree of drought and other bad weather affected 55 percent of cultivated land while an estimated 60 percent of agricultural land received no rain at all [2].

The Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbooks for 1958 to 1962 speak of abnormal weather, droughts followed by floods. This includes 30 inches of rain at Hong Kong in five days in June 1959, part of a pattern that hit all of South China.

According to Jasper Becker - a journalist with long experience in China - in his book Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine, most of the critics of the Great Leap outside China "watched China from Hong Kong." Thus, the conflict in the 1950s and 1960s over the Great Leap shaped up roughly along the lines of those who had experience living in Mao-governed China and those who did not.

Starting in the early 1980s, critics of the Great Leap added quantitative muscle to their arsenal. U.S. Government employee Judith Banister published what became an influential article in the China Quarterly and since then estimates as high as 30 million deaths in the Great Leap became common in the U.S. press. Critics point to birth rate assumptions used in the most widely cited projections of famine deaths.

However, estimations vary largely because of inaccurate data. According to Wim F Werthheim, emeritus professor from the University of Amsterdam, in the article "Wild Swans and Mao's Agrarian Strategy";

Often it is argued that at the censuses of the 1960s "between 17 and 29 millions of Chinese" appeared to be missing, in comparison with the official census figures from the 1950s. But these calculations are lacking any semblance of reliability...it is hard to believe that suddenly, within a rather short period (1953-1960), the total population of China had risen from 450 [million] to 600 million.[3]

Today there is a growing exchange of ideas between China and the West. Discussion of population projection and statistical issues of the Great Leap is becoming more frequent.

During the Great Leap, the Chinese economy initially grew, and iron production increased 45% in 1958 and a combined 30% over the next two years, but plummeted in 1961, and would not reach the level it was at in 1958 until 1964. Despite the risks to their careers, some Communist Party members openly laid blame for the disaster at the feet of the Party leadership and took it as proof that China must rely more on education, acquiring technical expertise and applying bourgeois methods in developing the economy. It was principally to crush this opposition that Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in early 1966.

Mao stepped down as State Chairman (President) of the PRC in 1959, predicting he would take most of the blame for the failure of the Great Leap Forward, though he did retain his position as Chairman of the CCP. Liu Shaoqi (the new PRC Chairman) and Deng Xiaoping (CCP General Secretary) were left in charge to execute measures to achieve economic recovery. Additionally, this failure in Mao's regime meant that he became a "dead ancestor" as he labelled himself, a person who was respected but never consulted, occupying the political background of the Party. Furthermore, he also stopped appearing in public. All of this was later regretted by Mao, as he relaunched his Cult of Personality with the Great Yangtze Swim.

Mao had however managed to remove Peng Dehuai as Defence Minister, replacing him with Lin Biao. This gave him a base to recover power during the Cultural Revolution.

After the death of Mao and the start of Chinese economic reform under Deng Xiaoping the tendency within the Chinese government was to see the Great Leap Forward as a major economic disaster and to attribute it to the cult of personality under Mao Zedong and to regard it as one of the serious errors he made after the founding of the People's Republic of China.

See also

• Marxism
• Maoism
• The Hundred Flowers Movement
• List of CCP Campaigns
• Breaking With Old Ideas
• Three Years of Natural Disasters

Bibliography

• Greene, Felix. A Curtain of Ignorance: China: How America Is Deceived. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965)
• Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts : Mao's Secret Famine. (1996)

External links

• Mao Zedong - Time.com's Most Important People of the Century
• Further information about Zedong, including Chinese writtenprimary and secondary sources
• Propaganda Posters In the time of Great Leap Forward