ON THIS DAY ·
Beidaihe conference
17–30 Aug 1958 — At this seaside resort, the Politburo endorsed the communes and doubled the year’s steel target to 10.7 million tonnes, twice the output of 1957. Within weeks some 90 million people were feeding pots, pans and tools into backyard furnaces. Most of the product was brittle pig iron of little use.
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The moment in context
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.
From Great Leap Forward, chapter 6 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976 (1958).
The place: Beidaihe conference — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- 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…
- The turn — 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…
- 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…
Then ask the room: How far was Mao personally responsible for the Great Leap Forward and its failure? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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