Summary

In 1958, for reasons which are still debated, Mao decided to push the pace of change much harder, and introduced the 'Great Leap Forward' – an economic revolution based on the peasants.

It was a disaster.

Links:

The following websites will help you complete the task:

The Great Leap:
• History Learning Site

• Photos (sanitised) from the time

• The Great Famine - a personal account 

• Chinese posters

• A 5-part BBC documentary (scroll down to the Great Leap)

Collectivisation would feed the industrial workers in the towns and produce a cash crop for export

An ambitious set of industrial targets

Mao believed that his targets could be achieved by ‘people’s hearts and minds’, and by mass labour

The construction of the terraces at Dazhai (200 miles south-west of Beijing) was held up as an example to emulate; later it emerged they were built not by peasant labourers, but by soldiers, with state funding

Industrialisation was to be achieved, not in the towns, but in each commune (e.g. backyard furnaces)

The commune was supposed to provide its families with all they needed, including hospitals and schools; in some places people handed over all their possessions and went to live in ‘habitation centres’

People abandoned the fields and spent days tending home-made furnaces

Private firms and joint state-private enterprises were taken over by the government

State-controlled targets were set, and constantly revised upwards; none of these targets were achieved, but officials constantly claimed they had been exceeded

Output fell – 1958-62 the output of coal fell from 230million tonnes to 180million, the output of light industry fell by 30%, of heavy industry by 65%

Quickly rushed-out goods fell apart

The steel produced in the peasant furnaces was simply buried – it was unusable; meanwhile, the peasants had used their pots and tools, and cut down huge swathes of forest to make it (= a personal and an environmental disaster)

Terrified officials tried to bully the peasants to produce more. Anybody who tried to carry on with the old ways was a ‘rightist’ and imprisoned. Millions were sent to the Laogai (prison camps)

The result was widespread famine which killed perhaps 30 million Chinese

Mao’s belief that human willpower alone could bring economic growth was wrong

There was no planning – simply targets were issued without any advice about how to achieve them

Nobody dared contradict Mao or admit failure. Anyone who questioned success was denounced as a ‘bourgeois reactionary’. There were no accurate inspections and reports – instead officials simply made up ever-bigger lies

The huge Yangzi River dried up in 1960, but that same year there were devastating floods in the south

In 1960, Mao quarrelled with Khrushchev, as a result of which the Soviet experts were recalled – half of China’s Soviet-run industrial plants had to close down

i.e. in the 'Three Bitter Years' of 1959-61 (Central China was worst-hit)

Tibet was particularly badly hit because – as the Panchen Lama discovered in 1962 – the PRC was guilty of intentional genocide, forbidding the Tibetans to grow grain or move their yak herds

Fearing mass revolution, the government imposed martial law in 1962

People fought for and stole food. Starving peasants sold, and (it was said) even ate, their children

Anybody who spoke of famine was declared to a traitor