Great Leap Forward

Historical background

During the 1950s, the Chinese had carried out a program of land distribution coupled with industrialization under state ownership with grudging technical assistance from the Soviet Union. By the mid-1950s the situation in Mainland China had somewhat stabilized, and the immediate threat from the wars in Korea against the United States and in Vietnam against France had receded. People perceived as capitalists by the new leadership had been expropriated in 1952-1953, members of the left-wing opposition imprisoned at the same time, and the remaining Kuomintang on the mainland had been eliminated. For the first time in generations, China seemed to have a strong and stable national government. However, Mao Zedong had become alarmed by Soviet Union Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's term since the 20th Party Congress Twentieth Congress. He perceived that far from "catching up and overtaking" the West, the Soviet economy was being allowed to fall behind. Uprisings had taken place in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the USSR was seeking "Peaceful coexistence" with what the Chinese regarded as imperialism/ imperialist Western powers. These policies meant for Mao that the PRC had to be prepared to "Sino-Soviet split go it alone."

The Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward borrowed elements from the history of the Soviet Union|USSR in a uniquely Chinese combination. Collective farming Collectivization from the Soviet Union|USSR's "Third Period;" stakhanovite|Stakhanovism from the early 1930s; the "people's guards" Khrushchev had created in 1959; and the uniquely Chinese policy of establishing People's communes as relatively self-sufficient economic units, incorporating light industry and construction projects. It was thought that through collectivization and mass labor, China's steel production would surpass that of the United Kingdom only 15 years after the start of the "leap." An experimental commune was established in Henan early in 1958, and soon spread throughout the country. Tens of millions were mobilized to produce one commodity, symbolic of industrialisation—steel. Approximately 25,000 communes were set-up, each with around 5,000 households. The hope was to industrialize by making use of the massive supply of cheap labor and avoid having to import heavy machinery. Small backyard steel furnaces were built in every commune while peasants produced "turds" of cast iron made out of scrap. Sometimes even factories, schools, and hospitals abandoned their work to smelt iron. The majority of this home produced iron was of extremely low quality and completely useless for any purposes. Simultaneously, the peasants were collectivized.

Outcome

The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen both within China and outside as a major economic disaster. As inflated statistics reached planning authorities, orders were given to divert human resources into industry rather than agriculture. Various Western and Eastern http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htmput the death toll at about 25 million people, with the majority of the deaths owed to starvation. The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years," the Three Years of Natural Disasters (although this name is now rarely used in China), and the Great Leap Famine, as the Chinese people suffered from extreme shortages of food. It is believed by some to have been the greatest famine in history. Droughts, floods, and general bad weather caught China completely by surprise. In July of 1959, the Yellow River flooded in East China. According to the Disaster Centerhttp://www.disastercenter.com/disaster/TOP100K.html it directly killed, either through starvation from crop failure or drowning, an estimated 3 million people, while other areas were affected in other ways as well. It is ranked as the seventh deadliest natural disaster in the 20th century. In 1960, at least some degree of drought and other bad weather affected 55 percent of cultivated land while an estimated 60 percent of agricultural land received no rain at all http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FD01Ad04.html The Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbooks for 1958 to 1962 speak of abnormal weather, droughts followed by floods. This includes 30 inches of rain at Hong Kong in five days in June 1959, part of a pattern that hit all of South China. However, it is extremely misleading to blame the widespread famines on abnormal weather. Many observers have noted that under sensible agrarian policy, the abnormal weather would not have caused widespread famine. The Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, who has written extensively on the causes of '''famine''', phrases the argument this way:

I have discussed elsewhere the remarkable fact that, in the terrible history of famines in the world, no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. We cannot find exceptions to this rule, no matter where we look: the recent famines of Ethiopia, Somalia, or other dictatorial regimes; famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; China's 1958-61 famine with the failure of the Great Leap Forward; or earlier still, the famines in Ireland or India under alien rule. China, although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine, indeed the largest recorded famine in world history: Nearly 30 million people died in the famine of 1958-61, while faulty governmental policies remained uncorrected for three full years. The policies went uncriticized because there were no opposition parties in parliament, no free press, and no multiparty elections. Indeed, it is precisely this lack of challenge that allowed the deeply defective policies to continue even though they were killing millions each year. The same can be said about the world's two contemporary famines, occurring right now in North Korea and Sudan.

Famines are often associated with what look like natural disasters, and commentators often settle for the simplicity of explaining famines by pointing to these events: the floods in China during the failed Great Leap Forward, the droughts in Ethiopia, or crop failures in North Korea. Nevertheless, many countries with similar natural problems, or even worse ones, manage perfectly well, because a responsive government intervenes to help alleviate hunger. Since the primary victims of a famine are the indigent, deaths can be prevented by recreating incomes (for example, through employment programs), which makes food accessible to potential famine victims. Even the poorest democratic countries that have faced terrible droughts or floods or other natural disasters (such as India in 1973, or Zimbabwe and Botswana in the early 1980s) have been able to feed their people without experiencing a famine.

-- Sen, A., Journal of Democracy, 1999.

According to Jasper Becker - a journalist with long experience in China - in his book '''', most of the critics of the Great Leap outside China "watched China from Hong Kong." Thus, the conflict in the 1950s and 1960s over the Great Leap shaped up roughly along the lines of those who had experience living in Mao-governed China and those who did not. W.E.B. DuBois (1959, author of an article "China") visited China during the Great Leap Forward and never supported famine-related criticisms of the Great Leap. Another author visiting China during the Great Leap named Anna Louise Strong wrote a book titled ''When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet'' based on her experience. Strong's book is heavily criticized for its very positive portrayal of Chinese rule in Tibet. Starting in the early 1980s, critics of the Great Leap added quantitative muscle to their arsenal. U.S. Government employee Judith Banister published what became an influential article in the China Quarterly and since then estimates as high as 30 million deaths in the Great Leap became common in the Media of the United States|U.S. press. Critics point to birth rate assumptions used in the most widely cited projections of famine deaths. However, estimations vary largely because of inaccurate data. According to Wim F Werthheim, emeritus professor from the University of Amsterdam, in the article "Wild Swans and Mao's Agrarian Strategy"; :''Often it is argued that at the censuses of the 1960s "between 17 and 29 millions of Chinese" appeared to be missing, in comparison with the official census figures from the 1950s. But these calculations are lacking any semblance of reliability...it is hard to believe that suddenly, within a rather short period (1953-1960), the total population of China had risen from 450 to 600 million.' Chinese expert of demography, Dr Ping-ti Ho, professor of history at the University of Chicago, in a book titled Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953, Harvard East Asian Studies No 4, 1959, mentions that: :''My conclusion is that the claim that in the 1960s a number between 17 and 29 million people was "missing" is worthless if there was never any certainty about the 600 millions of Chinese. Most probably these "missing people" did not starve in the calamity years 1960-61, but in fact have never existed. ' Today there is a growing exchange of ideas between China and the West. Discussion of population projection and statistical issues of the Great Leap is becoming more frequent. During the Great Leap, the Chinese economy initially grew, and iron production increased 45% in 1958 and a combined 30% over the next two years, but plummeted in 1961, and would not reach the level it was at in 1958 until 1964. Despite the risks to their careers, some Communist Party members openly laid blame for the disaster at the feet of the Party leadership and took it as proof that China must rely more on education, acquiring technical expertise and applying bourgeoisie|bourgeois methods in developing the economic science|economy. It was principally to crush this opposition that Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in early 1966. Mao stepped down as Chairman of the CCP in 1959, predicting he would take most of the blame for the failure of the Great Leap Forward. This left a large vacuum of power within the Party, hence the resulting "Power Struggle". Liu Shaoqi (PRC Chairman) and Deng Xiaoping (CCP General Secretary) were left in charge to execute measures to achieve economic recovery. Additionally, this failure in Mao's regime meant that he became a "dead ancestor" as he labelled himself, a person who was respected but never consulted, occupying the political background of the Party. Furthermore, he also stopped appearing in public. All of this was later regretted by Mao, as he relaunched his Cult of Personality with the publishing of the Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung|Little Red Book and the Great Yangtze Swim. After the death of Mao and the start of Chinese economic reform under Deng Xiaoping the tendency within the Chinese government was to see the Great Leap Forward as a major economic disaster and to attribute it to the cult of personality under Mao Zedong and to regard it as one of the serious errors he made after the founding of the People's Republic of China.

See also

Marxism

Maoism

The Hundred Flowers Movement

List of CCP Campaigns

Breaking With Old Ideas

Three Years of Natural Disasters

Bibliography

Greene, Felix. ''A Curtain of Ignorance: China: How America Is Deceived''. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965)

Becker, Jasper. ''Hungry Ghosts : Mao's Secret Famine''. (1996)

External links

http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/mao.html

http://www.planio.it/linearossa/lrengmao.htm and Secondary source|secondary sources]

http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/glf.html