THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD: IMPACT AND CONSEQUENCES
China’s Great Leap Forward campaign of 1958-1960 was an intense and frantic mobilization of an unprecedented magnitude to continue a struggle that was considered to be part of a permanent revolution. While retaining a socialist base, communism was to be invoked hand-in-hand with modernization, bringing relief to the long suffering of China’s peasants and ensuring a miraculously immediate millenarian land of plenty. Instead, the judgment of history paints a far different picture. An irreversible focusing of profound rifts in the Chinese Communist Party and a delirious fabrication of reality led to rapid disintegration of the Leap’s goals, and to what perhaps was the greatest famine in human history. Both the immediate impact and far-reaching consequences of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) influence the current trends and priorities of today’s China, and understanding the nature of these past events is crucial in ascertaining the nature of the present.
The Hundred Flowers campaign and the following rectification movement in 1956-1957 left the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) divided and hesitant, sincerely concerned with acute contradictions within itself and among the Chinese people (Domenach 119). At that time, talk of future industrialization and economic growth was timid at best, as stated by Liu Shaoqi’s political report at the Eighth National Congress of the CCP in September 1956:
On the basis of actual conditions of our country, the Central Committee has thus defined the Party’s general line in the period of transition: to bring about, step by step, socialist industrialization and to accomplish, step by step, the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts and capitalist industry and commerce over a fairly long period. (Liu 2)
No talk of “leaps” had emerged yet, and the industrial growth of about 18.7 percent during the First Five Year Plan period was accompanied by a slow crawl in agricultural production of only about 3.8 percent (Spence 574).
Chairman Mao’s extremely sensitive political antennae were very alert in 1957, as the completion of a basic socialist system both confirmed his confidence in his own leadership and opened the question of what direction China’s socialist politics would take (Womack 24). He felt China had reached the next stage in its continuous and permanent revolution, one that could actualize traditional Marxist theory in a uniquely Chinese way. If China lacked the economic prerequisites that Marx had defined for a communist society, Mao had begun to believe that those same economic conditions could be brought into existence in the very process of striving to realize ultimate communist goals (Meisner 210). Thus, he became more and more frustrated with what he saw as a lagging process toward communism that was being prolonged unnecessarily.
His feeling of urgency for China’s future was greatly intensified during a crucial visit to Moscow in November 1957. Conflict and competition between Mao and Khrushchev were becoming more and more apparent. Khrushchev had boasted that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in the output of major products in fifteen years, and Mao reacted by committing China to a similar competition (MacFarquhar, Cheek, and Wu 14). Upon his return to China, he began paving the way for an immediate move from the moderate to the frenzied, focused on the setting of targets that were from the outset over-ambitious.
These targets must be seen not only as an attempt at modernization, but also as a fusion of rapid economic growth and its fuel, consisting of equally rapid processes of radical social and ideological change (Meisner 204). The impetus was to pave a Chinese road to an eventual state of absolute communism that was ahead of the Soviet Union, in effect, to launch a Chinese “sputnik” (MacFarquhar, Cheek, and Wu 15). Mao had persuaded himself by now that this was a response to the spontaneous wishes of the people, to enlighten China’s countryside withindustrialization (de Bary and Lufrano 468).
The new rhetoric that Mao embraced was manifested in the nature of emerging propaganda that was regretfully drowned in overemphasis and incoherence. Automatically, the scale of the ambitions was in stark contrast with the muddiness of the formulations (Domenach 167). The Anti-Rightist Campaign had by then already made people within and without the Party scared to report anything but good news, and the new plans for China grew more from ideology than from efficiency (MacFarquhar 332). A battle on many fronts began: to strengthen industry, revolutionize agriculture, and implement communes in the countryside; all factors involved perpetuating and sustaining each other.
By the summer and fall of 1958, crucial policy decisions in the establishment of the communes were frenetically improvised on the spot by local leaders (Meisner 230). Mao had provided the spark that rapidly became a bonfire, engulfing the whole country in half-baked, misguided efforts to reshape the land as their own lives were reshaped by the communes. In a typical village, people would enter waving red flags, beating drums and gongs, and burning firecrackers, proclaiming the arrival of a new way of life (Leung 200-201). In Hebei, for example, the Provincial Committee of the Party boldly announced: “The great achievements of the overall leap forward have educated the masses and educated the cadres. People now unrestrictedly place confidence in the correctness of the leadership of the Party and fully realize the superiority of the socialist system and the great prowess of the working people in the conquest of nature” (Shi 278).
However, reaction was mixed, and included a mad rush to slaughter draft animals so that they would not be confiscated by the new communes (MacFarquhar 328). In the spirit of “communization” (gongchan feng), many communes were actually set up in a threatening, predatory fashion beyond the original intent of the Party. Properties and even entire handicraft workshops were impounded by local Party members to be absorbed into the new communes, alienating people by the hasty and arbitrary seizure of private property (Zhang 64). Internal reports even indicate resistance of a violent nature, peasants reportedly beating up cadres and leaving the communes, taking both grain and animals with them (Becker 54).
Radical transformation of the countryside included filling in lakes to create more fields for farming, the manual construction of huge dams and roads, and intensified mining (Bardeen 64). In addition, under direct guidelines issued from Mao himself, new and bizarre agricultural techniques were insisted upon in an eightfold strategy: the popularization of new breeds and seeds, close planting, deep plowing, increased fertilization, the innovation of farm tools, improved field management, pest control, and increased irrigation (Becker 70).
Rural industry at this time was ushered in with a crazed steel-smelting campaign that, coupled with the vast array of constructions and earth-moving projects, totally diverted the peasant population (Clark 240). Able-bodied men and women worked around the clock fueling the inefficient furnaces that sprang up nationwide, consuming huge forest resources and every last scrap of metal or iron they could find (MacFarquhar 327). Meanwhile, much of the harvest was tragically wasted, left to rot out in the fields.
At the same time, highly trained engineers and scientists all over China whose advice could have saved tremendous losses in human effort and natural resources were labeled “bourgeois experts” and imprisoned or sentenced to manual labor (Becker 63). Thus, as the Party ecstatically created thousands of new colleges, universities, and research institutes, an emphasis of political loyalty rather than competence was placed on the education of China’s countryside (Zhou 61).
This loyalty entailed a firm belief in the millenarian proportion of the whole event and the easy abundance that will inevitably come from such toil. This happened in certain provinces more than others, as some regional leaders even went to the extreme of allowing people to eat as much as they could stand. In some communes, people were so relieved at the notion of free food that they consumed three months’ supply of grain in a mere two weeks (Yang 55).
State policy began to become a victim of its own guaranteed success as local leaders fiercely competed with one another using unrealistic goals and falsified accomplishments (Womack 29). Central leadership caught on to this trend and was gravely concerned not just at the lies but the means used in preserving them. Even Mao was alarmed at the abundance of claims being made: “We must get rid of the empty reports and foolish boasting, we must not compete for reputation, but serve reality. Some of the targets are high, and no measures have been taken to implement them; that is not good” (Schram 106).
Despite his alarm, however, the understanding among the Party members themselves that failure to respond to production imperatives could impact their own political future led to frenzied production of substandard, unusable products and outright lies about agricultural yields (MacFarquhar 248). Areas that had a greater density of party membership were more likely to stick to the letter of the central directives and were thus more moderate, while outlying areas, in their eagerness to demonstrate their loyalty to the Party, were more likely to overreact to central directives (Yang 245).
As a result of these self-perpetuating claims that rang hollow with fantasy, the Party itself began to lose legitimacy (Shi 273). At the same time, those who knew the truth of communal mess halls beginning to shut down, Party cadres refusing to work, and other serious deteriorations of the fledgling system would not speak up (Becker 80). Direct challenge to the bogus claims being made and direct pronouncements of the truth were nothing short of political suicide. Meanwhile, the truth slipped out of reach for the entire Party. In early 1959, the State Statistical Bureau was dismantled and replaced by “good news reporting stations” (Clark 239).
In the summer of 1959, well after the GLF had entered its crisis phase, Mao appeared critically under-informed in his dismissal of the possibility of disaster (Mosher 270). It was at a Party meeting in Lushan that Mao was first confronted with the festering and rapidly deteriorating problems of the communes and the utter disasters stemming from GLF policies (de Bary and Lufrano 470). Peng Dehuai, then the defense minister, delivered a letter to Mao that politely but unmistakably laid the blame where it ultimately belonged: with the Chairman (MacFarquhar 216).
Peng had broken a cardinal rule in Chinese factional politics in revealing not only which “faction” he belonged to, but in taking the wrong side at a potential situation of struggle (Shi 283). This resulted in a savage attack launched by Mao that was compellingly mixed with hints of apology and self-criticism: “The chaos caused was on a grand scale and I take responsibility” (Schram 146).
By that time, however, far away from the Party elite, the very structure of society was falling apart. Starvation was already progressing through the provinces as grain was being forcibly taken from the communes to, ironically enough, meet a raised quota of exports to the Soviet Union (Spence 583). The insanity of mind-boggling production goals persisted; coal production was to go from 30 million to 270 million tons, grain from 185 million to 525 million tons, and so on throughout the economy (Mosher 264).
As fall arrived and Mao had settled his personal score with those who dared to doubt him, he issued the following order to all of the provincial Party Committees: “On the basis of your actual conditions, adopt all effective measures, squeeze out all of the labor force that can be squeezed out, strengthen the first line of agricultural production, and speedily change the grave situation of the present insufficiency of the labor force” (MacFarquhar 324). In actuality, Mao was simply reacting to provincial initiatives already taking place, including a similar survival policy that had been fully implemented for over three months (Yang 75).
After a long winter, the spring of 1960 witnessed nature’s retaliation for the “war” that had been raged against her. A massive drought affected every province in China, bringing with it pests and diseases, while the worst typhoons in 50 years flooded twelve separate provinces (MacFarquhar 322). By the end of May, an undeniable indicator of widespread disaster came when the grain reserves in Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai became totally depleted (Becker 80). Mao was shocked by this and sank into a deep depression in which, according to his librarian, he sometimes sat for long periods of time, gazing at nothing in total silence (Yang 72).
The Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Justice both released internal documents during the first part of 1960 that drew attention to the severity of the famine’s impact. Cases of 96,200 anti-communist activities and 5,700,000 cases of sabotage, assassination, theft, and plunder had been reported over the course of the twelve preceding months (Shi 280-281). Meanwhile, some thirty percent of all rural units in China had already adopted some form of household responsibility and production without central authorization (Yang 241). Moral alienation and corruption followed in the wake of the struggle for survival, as a fundamental change began to occur in the paradigm of China’s goals. Material survival was to come first before any notion of a socialist cause could be acknowledged.
The legacy of this huge famine, in which up to 30 million Chinese had died, devastated agricultural growth for the following six years, finally beginning to recover in 1965 (Clark 244). The impact in areas of industry was similarly intense, as 100,000 enterprises were closed down between 1960 and 1965 so that over 20 million people could be withdrawn from the urban areas to help salvage something from the agricultural disaster and the stagnation that followed (MacFarquhar 330).
In looking at the long-term consequences of the Great Leap Forward and its subsequent famine, a pattern can be seen that transcends all of the movements, campaigns, and other easily labeled events. A considerable amount of work done on the part of China scholars, especially since the Cultural Revolution, attributes major changes in state policy to the Party elites and the campaigns that they initiated (Perry 2). Despite this, in the case of modern reforms in China it can be said that Deng Xiaoping and his economic liberalization initiatives were not simply initiatives from higher-ups who decide the future of their country. These initiatives are at least partially reactions to pervasive patterns that already existed.
It can be said that the national psyche of China was so deeply affected by this devastating event that it served as a psychological imperative for economic growth, regardless of the socialist aspect. Myths, formally held sacred, were permanently undermined, and the moral consensus of the socialist and communist systems was essentially destroyed. When the utopian aspirations of the GLF became seen as a field day for Party corruption, lies, and terrorism practiced on the people of the countryside, the gulf grew between the Party and the masses. This gulf has arguably remained wide since that time, and threatens to grow wider.
Despite the fact that the communes were falling apart by 1961, they were not entirely dismantled until 1984 (Zhang 66). While unofficial change in China is often improvised, official change is often painfully slow. It was not until 1981 that the issues of the GLF were addressed formally by the Communist Party, in a resolution which stated: “Comrade Mao Zedong and many leading comrades, both at the center and in the localities, were impatient for quick results and overestimated the role of man’s subjective will and efforts” (Womack 26).
Mao cannot be thoroughly demonized because of his delusions and the sufferings that they caused; but neither can an apologist stance be taken. In the same respect, the modern economic reforms in China are not simply consequences of a shifting influence in government policy-making, nor can they be fully attributed to the efforts of Deng Xiaoping and the official “Four Modernizations.” The consequences of the GLF and its immediate impact of famine extended into the realm of Chinese political action, which in a modern context is at least partially a reaction to what the Chinese people were already practicing. Forms of economic initiative and autonomy at the village level existed unofficially, years before they became a practice favored by the government. The main stance that emerges from a close examination of the GLF is an admiration for the resilience of a peasantry who are still striving for a better way of life.
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