Why did China’s recovery end in the Cultural Revolution?

The short answer

• The famine could no longer be denied. By 1960–61 Party investigators had brought evidence of mass death from Xinyang and elsewhere to Beijing, and China had to import grain from Canada and Australia. The distress was still visible in May 1962, when some 60,000 hungry people crossed from Guangdong into Hong Kong within a few weeks, along the map’s short arrow. Most were caught and sent back. Leaders needed food production to recover quickly or risk rural collapse; that urgency gave pragmatists room to change policy faster than ideology would normally have allowed.
• Pragmatists in charge of the economy. Liu Shaoqi had replaced Mao as head of state in 1959, and Mao withdrew further from daily government after the famine. Liu, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai managed recovery with experts, material incentives and a concern for results. Each good harvest strengthened their authority. It also pointed to a failure of Mao’s methods, making economic success politically threatening to him.
• Mao’s fear of revisionism. Mao watched Khrushchev denounce Stalin, promise Soviet citizens “goulash communism” and seek better relations with the United States. He concluded that Communist leaders themselves could restore capitalism from within the party. Chinese polemics against Moscow in 1963–64 made that argument public. Mao came to see Liu Shaoqi’s domestic policies as the same disease and launched the Socialist Education Movement as a first attempt to cure it.
• Enemies on several borders. Between 1962 and 1964 China fought India, quarreled openly with the Soviet Union and watched Mongolia side with Moscow. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, the United States bombed North Vietnam. Mao feared American or Soviet bombers could destroy industry on the coast and in the northeast. The Third Front and the rush to build an atomic bomb answered that fear.

What it changed

Mao turns on the Party. Mao’s suspicion came to rest on Party “power-holders” through the Socialist Education Movement and the Twenty-three Articles of January 1965. The following year he bypassed the Party machine and called on students to attack it. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, architects of recovery, became chief targets of the Cultural Revolution. Liu was expelled from the Party in 1968 and died in custody in 1969.

A cult ready to be used. By 1966 the Little Red Book was in every soldier’s pocket and Lei Feng’s diary in every school. When Red Guards rose that summer, they drew slogans, certainty and the belief that loyalty to Mao stood above loyalty to the Party from the cult Lin Biao had built in the army. Lin became its most prominent beneficiary and later its most prominent casualty.

Industry hidden in the mountains. The Third Front placed a large share of China’s new industry inland between 1965 and 1971. Steel at Panzhihua, vehicle works at Shiyan, defense plants around Chongqing and railways including the Chengdu–Kunming line remained afterward. Thousands of families were tied to remote towns for a generation. Its costs and legacies are still debated.

A baby boom after the famine. The return of food brought a surge in births. In 1963 the birth rate reached about 43 per thousand, the highest in the People’s Republic’s history; by the mid-1960s the population had passed 700 million. The boom produced the huge generation of young people who filled schools in 1966. It later pushed the state toward the birth-planning campaigns of the 1970s and the one-child policy of 1980.