Was China’s First Five-Year Plan a success, and for whom?

The short answer

• The war closed every other door. The Korean War left China subject to an American trade embargo and dependent on Soviet weapons, loans and advice. Moscow offered the blueprints, machine tools and engineers unavailable from the West, and agreed to help build 156 major projects. This shaped the economy as well as foreign policy. A factory using a Soviet design also needed compatible parts, training and planning methods.
• A Marxist faith in heavy industry. Party leaders associated socialism and national defense with steel, coal, electricity, machinery and a modern working class. The Soviet experience appeared to show that central planning could industrialize a backward country within a generation. Heavy industry consequently received the great majority of industrial investment. Consumer goods and agriculture had to wait, and leaders accepted slow gains in ordinary living standards as the price of national strength.
• Grain was the bottleneck. New city workers needed food, and food exports could pay for Soviet machines. Private grain markets failed to supply enough in 1953, so the state monopolized buying and selling and imposed low prices and quotas. Cooperatives made that system easier to administer: officials could deal with a few hundred thousand collective units instead of more than a hundred million separate households.
• Mao’s impatience with gradualism. In 1953 Mao replaced New Democracy with a “general line” for the transition to socialism. Planners and rural officials favored a slower course, but his impatience grew. His July 1955 speech made caution a political error. Officials accustomed to campaigns in which overfulfillment was safe then competed to enroll villages. Mao chose the direction, and the system’s incentives drove the rush.

What it changed

The Leap forward from the Plan. The Plan built industry faster than agriculture, and Mao came to regard the Soviet model as too slow and bureaucratic for China. From 1958 he sought to mobilize labor in place of capital, combining agriculture and industry in giant communes. The cooperatives created in 1956 provided their building blocks; the officials who had raced to collectivize now raced again.

The state could now take the harvest. Under the grain monopoly, officials could use the collectives to determine how much food a village retained. In ordinary years the system fed cities and paid for imports. In 1959–60 officials based procurements on inflated harvest reports, and the same machinery stripped villages bare. A system constructed to supply industry turned policy failure into famine among the people who grew the food.

Two classes of citizen. Urban work units supplied rations, pensions and health care. Rural people, by contrast, had to feed themselves from collective fields, and the 1958 household registration rules prevented them from moving to cities. This division survived Mao by decades. When food ran short in 1960, it helped determine who lived and who died.

Soviet ties that became a burden. The alliance had put Soviet designs and advisers into factories, schools and planning offices. Its breakdown in 1960 exposed the cost of that dependence: experts left, plants stood unfinished and blueprints were missing. China had to improvise. Self-reliance later became a praised virtue, but it began as necessity; the Lanzhou uranium plant, finished by Chinese engineers in 1964, became its proudest example.