Transcription
[Music] The first thing you ought to know about the Great Leap Forward, a series of policies aimed at industrializing communist China between 1958 and 1961, is that the term “Great Leap Forward” is actually a terrible name for what happened. It was, for all intents and purposes, a gigantic step backwards. So what was the program? Why did Mao Zedong launch the campaign? What were its terrible consequences on the Chinese population? Well, let’s take a look.
The year is 1958. China’s revolutionary chairman, Mao Zedong, unveils a new policy at the Communist Party Conference in Nanning. He calls it the Great Leap Forward. Mao’s goal was that China should, by the year 1973, have a new industrialized, centrally planned economy that would rival or surpass its Western rivals.
To understand what exactly the Great Leap Forward was and exactly what it aimed to do, there are two terms of particular significance that we should take note of: collectivization and industrialization.
First, collectivization. Prior to 1949, when the Communists came into power in China, Chinese peasants—the vast bulk of the population—were used to the private ownership of small bits of land. Mao was ideologically opposed to this; he was a hardline communist, after all, and sought to achieve his goals by forcing the peasants and farmers into thousands of people’s communes. This was collectivization—a situation in which farmers did not own individual farms, but where all such land was amalgamated into common ownership, hence “communism,” or in reality, the direct ownership of the state. This system was a staple of communist regimes and, as we’ll see in China, one that had disastrous consequences.
Secondly, industrialization. Mao knew that if China’s economy was to develop, it simply had to industrialize. In 1958, China’s economy was agrarian—that is, based almost entirely on agriculture and peasant farming. This put it significantly behind its rival Western powers. The Industrial Revolution, for instance, had transformed many European economies from around 1760 to 1840 from their agrarian roots with the introduction of heavy and automated machinery. Mao wanted to accomplish the same 80-year process with a population several times larger than that of Britain over a period of just 15 years.
So, in an attempt to rapidly industrialize China’s economy and develop its gigantic agrarian populace into commune-based districts, in 1958 the Great Leap Forward began. By the end of this first year, an absolutely massive 750 million people were forced into some 25,000 such communes across China. Peasant life was fantastically disrupted as private ownership was completely abolished. Farm workers who had no pre-expertise in industrial work were forced to start undertaking industrial-level projects. The Communist Party set targets—often highly unrealistic—for production of steel and other necessities that would be produced inside the communes. The communes themselves became so large—some with over 40,000 people—that they could not effectively be managed or run by the local Communist Party officials.
In the first year, the Great Leap Forward appeared to make modest gains in industrial output, and the agricultural sector had a relatively good harvest. But as the winter of 1959 approached, it was clear that something had gone horribly wrong. Reports of widespread famine, collapsing industrial and agricultural output, and deep discontent among the peasantry emerged all across China.
The Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the most disastrous famines of all time, claiming the lives of between 36 and 45 million people. The failure of the policy was, in many ways, the perfect storm. Firstly, massive numbers of farmers went from producing food to producing steel, in which they had no experience, causing both a collapse in output and substandard steel, often made in backyard furnaces. Secondly, the physical capacity of peasants was decimated by a huge emphasis on producing grain, destroying their capability of procuring food. Thirdly, during the years Mao forced the Great Leap Forward on his population, China suffered particularly bad droughts, typhoons, and flooding on the Yellow River, exacerbating what would become known as the great Chinese famine. In short, the Great Leap Forward was one of the largest man-made catastrophes in human history.
Postscript: Much of China suffered horrendously in the Great Leap Forward, so much so that the policies were largely canceled by 1961. The famine was so enormous that peasants often turned to cannibalism in a desperate bid to save themselves. And yet, people literally stared outside warehouses full of grain; officials were so obsessed with reaching production targets that, in some cases, they did not give away any of the produce to starving farmers. In most areas, officials greatly overstated the size of the harvests in order to avoid the appearance of failure.
With tens of millions dead in just 3 years, Mao’s position in the Communist Party was damaged greatly. Criticized at party meetings and sidelined within its halls of power, he resigned as Head of State in 1959, replaced by the more moderate Liu Shaoqi. Mao’s marginalization in the party during the early 1960s led him to attempt to reintroduce his style of communism within the government and China at large. He spent much time in this period developing an idea of continuous revolution, something that would set the stage for yet another nationwide disaster: the Cultural Revolution. But that is a story for another time.
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