Mao’s China · CHAPTER 6 ·
Great Leap Forward
Chapter 6 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976: “The Great Leap Forward”
The Great Leap Forward of 1958–60 was Mao’s attempt to industrialise China at breakneck speed through mass labour. Co-operatives became giant communes from April 1958, the deadline to overtake Britain in steel kept shrinking, and at Lushan in 1959 Mao dismissed his defence minister for criticising the Leap.
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The map above is the world of China, October 1958 — The Great Leap: communes and furnaces.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1960 · Europe in 1960.
Part of IB History: The People’s Republic under Mao →
SHORT EXPLANATION
In November 1957 Mao promised in Moscow that China would overtake Britain in steel within fifteen years. During 1958 the deadline grew shorter. He believed that China’s people could supply what the country lacked in money and machines: organized mass labor would carry it toward industrialization at a speed no planner thought possible.
The Great Leap Forward put that belief into a nationwide campaign. The Communist Party, which ran every level of government, set targets, staged mass meetings and punished the reluctant, much as in a wartime mobilization. Every province is hatched on the map to show the campaign; the red arrow follows Mao’s August 1958 tour of model villages. The member-owned and worked cooperatives of 1956 were combined into about 26,000 people’s communes, averaging nearly 5,000 households each. A commune ran farming, industry, schools and militia, like a whole county operating as one company town. Peasants ate in communal mess halls, and some 90 million people were sent to smelt iron in backyard furnaces, small brick kilns in villages and city yards.
Officials had reason to report miracles. Communes claimed harvests many times any yield ever recorded, while labor sent to furnaces left crops rotting in the fields. The state used those claims to set grain quotas, the amounts villages had to sell at fixed prices—effectively a tax paid in grain. Thus figures on paper determined how much food was taken from a much smaller real harvest.
At the Party leadership’s mountain-resort conference at Lushan in July 1959, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, the hero of Korea, warned Mao in a private letter. Mao purged him and launched a campaign against “right opportunists”, Party members accused of losing revolutionary nerve, rather like defeatists in wartime. Other critics fell silent as food ran out. A policy that might have been corrected in 1959 continued into the famine of 1959–61; the man most responsible for it was also the only one with power to stop it.
The full story
Mao’s Great Leap Forward sought to industrialize China in 1958–60 by mobilizing its people. He had become impatient with the Soviet model of central planning, in which ministries set factory output much as a head office assigns targets to branches. Collectivization appeared to offer another possibility: during 1955–56 family farms had been merged into cooperatives owned and worked by their members, like farmers’ cooperatives made compulsory.
The leadership’s response to caution helps explain why the new drive accelerated. In January 1958 Mao attacked Premier Zhou Enlai for his 1956 “opposition to rash advance” so fiercely that Zhou offered to resign. Meanwhile tens of millions of peasants dug irrigation works during the winter of 1957–58. Their apparent success encouraged Mao to believe that labor could substitute for capital. He described China’s people as “poor and blank” and saw poverty as an advantage: people with nothing to lose would leap.
The commune gave this ambition an institution. It could gather tens of thousands of people for dams and furnaces while directing farming, industry, schools and militia across a district—rather like a county run as a single company town. The first commune was formed in Suiping county, Henan, in April 1958 and named Sputnik after the Soviet satellite.
Mao visited model counties in three provinces in August, following the route marked by the red arrow. He praised communes and asked at Xushui what peasants would do with so much grain. At Beidaihe that month the Politburo, the inner cabinet of the Party that governed at every level, endorsed the communes and a steel target of 10.7 million tonnes, twice the 1957 output. Nearly every rural household belonged to a commune by December.
The new arrangements changed who controlled food and labor. Communal mess halls provided free meals, freeing women from cooking for work in fields and furnaces. Private plots, family pigs and village markets disappeared. A household no longer had the same means of securing its own food if the collective supply failed.
Officials faced pressure to report abundance. A modest harvest report could bring an accusation of rightism, the charge that had branded some 550,000 critics in 1957. Counties competed to launch “sputniks”, claims of yields many times those previously achieved. The 1958 harvest was announced as 375 million tonnes; the real figure was about 200 million.
Those false figures had practical consequences. The state based procurement—compulsory purchase at a fixed price, effectively a tax in grain—on the reported harvest. In 1959 it took close to two-fifths of a shrinking real harvest. Backyard furnaces meanwhile consumed pots, tools and doors and produced mostly useless iron. The campaign was taking food and useful equipment on the strength of an abundance that existed on paper.
At the Party’s mountain-resort meeting at Lushan in July 1959, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai wrote to Mao and called the problem “petty-bourgeois fanaticism”. Mao turned the disagreement into a test of loyalty. Peng was dismissed, and officials across China were punished as “right opportunists”, Party members accused of losing revolutionary nerve. A chance to stop the drive became a decision to renew it.
FULL EXPLANATION
Why did Mao launch the Leap?
Mao wanted a different route to industrialization, but historians disagree about how responsibility for that choice should be distributed. In the second volume of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Roderick MacFarquhar traces Mao’s rejection of the Soviet model in 1956–57. Mao saw it as bureaucratic, slow and overly dependent on experts; China’s abundant labor seemed to offer an alternative. The November 1957 Moscow meeting added a competitive purpose. Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States, and Mao promised that China would overtake Britain. Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, in China’s Road to Disaster, emphasize Mao’s personal direction of the policy. In their account Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai went along through loyalty and fear after the attack on “opposing rash advance”. Other historians give greater weight to provincial leaders who drove their regions ahead of Beijing. However blame is shared, few doubt the importance of Mao’s conviction that political will could overcome material limits.
How the numbers lied
Grain policy depended on knowing the harvest, but the Leap made an accurate report politically dangerous. The State Statistical Bureau lost its independence; targets shaped figures, and each level of government added to claims from below. A county leader who reported less than his neighbors risked being labeled a rightist. The People’s Daily printed photographs of children standing on wheat supposedly dense enough to bear their weight. Thomas Bernstein showed the cost of the inflated reports: procurement took close to two-fifths of the real 1959 harvest, the highest share of the decade, because quotas were based on claimed output. Mao himself suspected the figures by late 1958 and briefly encouraged retreat at the Zhengzhou and Wuchang meetings. At Lushan in 1959 he reversed that correction and treated doubts about the numbers as disloyalty. Punishing the people who brought bad news deprived the government of knowledge it needed.
Lushan: the decision that made the famine
Li Rui, one of Mao’s secretaries, kept notes of the July–August 1959 Lushan meeting that were later published. They show a gathering called to consolidate a modest retreat. On 14 July Peng Dehuai wrote a measured letter praising the Leap’s achievements and criticizing its excesses. Mao circulated it. The discussion took a different course on 23 July, when Mao told the meeting that if the army followed Peng he would go to the countryside and raise a new Red Army. Peng, Zhang Wentian, Huang Kecheng and Zhou Xiaozhou were condemned as an “anti-Party clique”, and Lin Biao replaced Peng as defense minister. The campaign against right opportunism made every provincial leader inflate targets again. Most historians agree that without Lushan the retreat begun in late 1958 might have continued, and many millions of those who died in the famine might have lived.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The easy victory of collectivisation. Collectivization had taken eighteen months and ended without the famine that followed Stalin’s. During the winter of 1957–58, tens of millions of peasants were then mobilized for irrigation. Mao took these experiences as evidence that organization and enthusiasm could accomplish in months what planners expected to take years. The cooperatives were also ready-made units for merger into communes, and officials who had raced to enroll villages in 1955 were ready to race again.
Overtaking Britain. The deadline came from rivalry within the Communist world. At the November 1957 Moscow conference of Communist parties, Khrushchev claimed that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in fifteen years. Mao responded that China would overtake Britain in steel over the same period. Steel became a measure of success in the resulting race, and the target date was brought forward repeatedly in 1958.
A Party that had silenced its critics. Economists, engineers and journalists who might have challenged impossible targets had been removed or frightened by the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Caution was dangerous inside the Party too. Mao’s January 1958 attack on Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun for “opposing rash advance” showed that even senior leaders could be humiliated. Silence at the top encouraged silence below, where the penalties for doubt were harsher still.
Mao’s faith in human will. Mao’s experience at Yan’an had convinced him that a determined, well-organized people could defeat stronger enemies. Applied to the economy, that conviction became a belief that “politics in command” and mass mobilization could substitute for capital, machinery and expertise. Close planting and deep ploughing, borrowed from discredited Soviet agronomy, were imposed everywhere as proof of revolutionary methods’ superiority to conventional science. Many agronomists who objected had been labeled rightists the previous year, removing a scientific check.
THE TURNING POINT
Lushan, July–August 1959. At Lushan in July–August 1959, the Leap could still have been halted without catastrophe. Peng Dehuai’s moderate letter had the private support of many leaders. Mao treated it as an attack on his authority, making officials’ loyalty the issue instead of the feasibility of the targets. The ensuing campaign against right opportunism pushed officials at every level to revive inflated targets and requisitions. The meeting set the course toward the famine of 1959–61.
What it changed
The Great Famine. The countryside began to starve in the winter of 1958–59. Private food supplies had been abolished, communal mess halls were running out and quotas rested on false harvest reports. After Lushan, requisitions were pressed harder. Between 1959 and 1961 an estimated 15 to 45 million people died in the largest famine in recorded history; provinces whose leaders had been most zealous in 1958 suffered most.
Lin Biao takes the army. When Peng fell, Lin Biao became defense minister. He built his position by promoting the study of Mao’s thought in the army, culminating in the Little Red Book of quotations in 1964. The cult unleashed during the Cultural Revolution had first been organized in the barracks after Lushan. By 1969 Lin was Mao’s named successor; two years later Mao turned against him, suspecting the army’s new power threatened his own.
Mao on the second line. Mao called his withdrawal from daily government the “second line”. In April 1959 he gave Liu Shaoqi the post of head of state, saying he wanted to concentrate on theory. When famine forced a retreat, Liu, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun managed it. Their growing authority became a source of Mao’s resentment and helped set up the struggle of 1966, when the managers of the famine became targets of the Cultural Revolution.
Khrushchev’s scorn. The Leap sharpened the quarrel with Moscow. Khrushchev mocked the communes publicly in 1959, and Mao suspected that Peng Dehuai had discussed his criticisms with Soviet leaders during a spring visit to Eastern Europe. Soviet experts were withdrawn in 1960. Each side regarded the other’s policies as a betrayal of revolution, and the alliance never recovered.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — How far was Mao personally responsible for the Great Leap Forward and its failure?
Mao bears primary responsibility for the decisions that launched and sustained the Leap. He devised its central ideas, attacked cautious colleagues in January 1958, and promoted the communes and steel target. At Lushan he purged Peng Dehuai and revived the campaign while a correction was under way. Teiwes and Sun conclude that no other leader could have started or stopped it. The policy nevertheless required many participants. Wu Zhipu in Henan and Li Jingquan in Sichuan competed to exceed targets; county officials invented harvests; colleagues in Beijing remained silent about their doubts. Andrew Walder and other historians therefore stress the party-state’s incentives: a system rewarding zeal and punishing honesty would have produced inflated claims under any leader conducting such a campaign. That system helps explain why Mao’s decisions went unchallenged, while his choices remain the primary responsibility.
An interesting fact
The “Four Pests” campaign targeted rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows, accused of eating grain. For three days in April 1958 Beijing residents banged pots, beat drums and waved flags from roofs and trees, keeping sparrows from landing until they fell from exhaustion. The birds also ate insects, and locust and pest damage worsened. Scientists including the ornithologist Zheng Zuoxin warned the leadership; in 1960 sparrows were quietly replaced on the list by bedbugs. The episode became a standard example in China and abroad of a campaign overriding expert advice.
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