Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward was an industrialization campaign within China from 1958 to 1962, led by the Chinese Communist Party. CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to transform the country from an agrarian society into an industrialized society through the formation of people's communes. The Great Leap Forward is estimated to have led to between 15 and 55 million deaths in mainland China during the 1959–1961 Great Chinese Famine it caused, making it the largest or second-largest famine in human history.
The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals, the need to find new ways to generate domestic capital, rising enthusiasm about the potential results mass mobilization might produce, and reaction against the sociopolitical results of the Soviet Union's development strategy." Mao held strongly anti-intellectual views and was hostile toward the intelligentsia, which he viewed as embodying traditional Chinese ways, who constantly pointed to technical constraints on what mass mobilization could accomplish. The Great Leap strategy depended on the mobilization of peasants to provide for themselves without drawing resources from the urban economy, while supplying food, industrial crops, and even steel for urban industrial growth, without new investment from the national budget. The subsequent famine was exacerbated by grain procurement quotas imposed from above, which were based on misinformation about conditions in the countryside. After the Lushan Conference in 1959, the campaign against "rightism" contributed to renewed radicalism and widespread misreporting of production figures. The leadership continued to demand food for the cities even as agricultural output fell, and local officials collected grain to satisfy superiors; officials also sought to cover up the extent of the crisis, contributing to famine in the countryside.
The major changes which occurred in the lives of rural Chinese people included the incremental introduction of mandatory agricultural collectivization. Private farming was prohibited, and those people who engaged in it were persecuted and labeled counter-revolutionaries. Restrictions on rural people were enforced with public struggle sessions and social pressure, and forced labor was also exacted on people. Rural industrialization, while officially a priority of the campaign, saw "its development ... aborted by the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward". Economist Dwight Perkins argues that "enormous amounts of investment only produced modest increases in production or none at all. ... In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster".
The CCP studied the damage that was done at various conferences from 1960 to 1962, especially at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962, during which Mao Zedong ceded day-to-day leadership to pragmatic moderates like Chinese President Liu Shaoqi and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping. In the early 1960s, Mao endorsed a period of economic "readjustment" and acknowledged responsibility for mistakes, while maintaining that the "three red flags" could not be challenged. From 1961 to 1965, official propaganda portrayed Mao as virtually infallible and shifted blame for the Great Leap Forward disaster onto lower-level officials. He initiated the Socialist Education Movement in 1963 and the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in order to remove opposition and re-consolidate his power. In addition, dozens of dams constructed in Zhumadian, Henan, during the Great Leap Forward collapsed in 1975 and resulted in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure, with estimates of its death toll ranging from tens of thousands to 240,000.
Background
The core goal of the Great Leap Forward was to increase industrial and agricultural outputs by using mass mobilization to raise labor inputs and therefore overcome China's lack of material, technological and monetary inputs. The Great Leap Forward also sought to address imbalances between rural China and urban China that existed in the prerevolutionary period and continued into the 1950s.Classical Marxist theory hypothesized a relatively linear progression of development and a worldwide revolution beginning with the most developed countries. At the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the country was one of the poorest in the world. The Great Leap Forward attempted to defy the conventional understanding of the time required for economic development. Through rapid industrialization, it aimed to close the gap between China's developmental stage and its political aspirations. In March 1955, at a national conference of the Party, Mao declared that China "would catch up with and surpass the most powerful capitalist countries in several dozen years", and in October, Mao announced that he would complete the building of a socialist state in 15 years.
In the late 1950s, China's socio-political landscape experienced significant rural reforms and the aftermath of previous policies aimed at collectivization rather than individualism. Before the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese government initiated land reforms that redistributed land from landlords to peasants, but these reforms still needed to attain the expected agricultural productivity. The early 1950s saw the establishment of agricultural cooperatives, yet these changes brought mixed outcomes. However, the push towards rapid industrialization and the establishment of people's communes in rural areas were central to the Great Leap Forward, reflecting the government's belief that collectivization and large-scale projects would boost agricultural and industrial outputs. The communes were meant to centralize farming and labor, supposedly leading to increased efficiency and output; still, in reality, and practice, these measures often disrupted traditional farming practices and led to decreased productivity. Dali Yang stated, "The initial stages of collectivization brought chaos and inefficiency, with agricultural productivity often declining".
By the time of the Great Leap Forward, increased Sino-Soviet tensions meant that China could not depend on Soviet technological assistance. Mao emphasized China's self-reliance in technology and industry and discouraged reliance on foreign technology.
Agricultural collectives and other social changes
Before 1949, peasants had farmed their own small pockets of land and observed traditional practices—festivals, banquets, and paying homage to ancestors. It was realized that Mao's policy of using a state monopoly on agriculture to finance industrialization would be unpopular with the peasants. Therefore, it was proposed that the peasants should be brought under Party control by the establishment of agricultural collectives which would also facilitate the sharing of tools and draft animals.This policy was gradually pushed through between 1949 and 1958 in response to immediate policy needs, first by establishing "mutual aid teams" of 5–15 households, then in 1953 "elementary agricultural cooperatives" of 20–40 households, then from 1956 in "higher co-operatives" of 100–300 families. From 1954 onward peasants were encouraged to form and join collective-farming associations, which would supposedly increase their efficiency without robbing them of their own land or restricting their livelihoods.
By 1958, private ownership was abolished and all households were forced into state-operated communes. Mao demanded that the communes increase grain production to feed the cities and to earn foreign exchange through exports. China must follow a different path to socialism than the Soviet Union, Mao told delegates, by allowing its peasants to participate in economic modernisation and making more use of their labour.
Apart from progressive taxation on each household's harvest, the state introduced a system of compulsory state purchases of grain at fixed prices to build up stockpiles for famine-relief and meet the terms of its trade agreements with the Soviet Union. Together, taxation and compulsory purchases accounted for 30% of the harvest by 1957, leaving very little surplus. Rationing was also introduced in the cities to curb 'wasteful consumption' and encourage savings, and although food could be purchased from state-owned retailers the market price was higher than that for which it had been purchased. This too was done in the name of discouraging excessive consumption.
Besides these economic changes, the CCP implemented major social changes in the countryside including the banishing of all religious and mystic institutions and ceremonies, replacing them with political meetings and propaganda sessions. Attempts were made to enhance rural education and the status of women and ending foot-binding, child marriage and opium addiction. The old system of internal passports was introduced in 1956, preventing inter-county travel without appropriate authorization. Highest priority was given to the urban proletariat for whom a welfare state was created.
The first phase of collectivization resulted in modest improvements in output. Famine along the mid-Yangzi was averted in 1956 through the timely allocation of food-aid, but in 1957 the Party's response was to increase the proportion of the harvest collected by the state to insure against further disasters. Moderates within the Party, including Zhou Enlai, argued for a reversal of collectivization on the grounds that claiming the bulk of the harvest for the state had made the people's food-security dependent upon the constant, efficient, and transparent functioning of the government.
Hundred Flowers Campaign and Anti-Rightist Campaign
In 1957, Mao responded to the tensions which existed in the Party by launching the Hundred Flowers Campaign as a way to promote free speech and criticism. Some scholars have retrospectively concluded that this campaign was a ploy designed to allow critics of the regime, primarily intellectuals but also low ranking members of the party who were critical of the agricultural policies, to identify themselves.By the time of the completion of the first 5 Year Economic Plan in 1957, Mao had come to believe that the path to socialism that had been followed by the Soviet Union was not appropriate for China. He was critical of Khrushchev's reversal of Stalinist policies and he was also alarmed by the uprisings that had taken place in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the perception that the USSR was seeking "peaceful coexistence" with the Western powers. Mao had become convinced that China should follow its own path to communism. According to Jonathan Mirsky, a historian and a journalist who specialized in Chinese affairs, China's isolation from most of the rest of the world, along with the Korean War, had accelerated Mao's attacks on his perceived domestic enemies. It led him to accelerate his designs to develop an economy where the regime would get maximum benefit from rural taxation.
The Anti-Rightist Campaign started on 8 June 1957. The main goal was to purge "rightists" from the CCP and China altogether. It was believed that approximately 5 percent of the population was still "rightists".