China's Great Leap Forward.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

I'd like to know more about this policy, I have recently watched a documentary that saw the Great Leap Forward as the direct cause of the following famine. The film I watched didn't analyse the aftermath of the GLF; all that it can tell us is that this policy was a failure that made people hungrier than before.

Was the GLF the cause of the three year famine in China?

If yes, was this famine an inevitable part of the industrialisation of China?

Did the GLF have success in modernising China?

What position would China be in now if this policy had not been put into place?

I am interested to hear some of your answers. It would be nice to get some kind of objective understanding of the Great Leap Forward from different sources, I will not buy into the notion that it was all bad when I hear it in one single American documentary. That is not a good method of understanding anything.

[Shokaract]

Well, the Great Leap Forward policy did contribute to the famine.
But the famine is also linked with some of the worst natural disasters of 20th century China.

It should also be noted that in its history China experienced a regular series of significant famines before the Communist revolution, such as in 1942-1943, 1936, 1928-1929, 1920-1921, 1911, 1907, 1896-1897, 1876-1879, 1850-1873, 1849, 1846, 1811, and 1810. In the earlier dynastic periods, the regular flooding and changing path of the Huang He also caused regular famines at the center of Chinese civilization.

Early in 1958, there were signs of success and significantly improved yields.
In their enthusiasm, local cadre began to over-report their yields and, when leaders like Mao and Liu would visit, they would put on a show to confirm their reports.


The Great Leap Forward became both a production drive and a continuation of Mao’s attack on bureaucracy and elitism that had been curtailed by the start of the anti-rightist campaign. Agricultural and political decisions were decentralized. China’s surplus labor force was put to work increasing agricultural production by developing new irrigation and water conservancy projects. Thousands of simple small-scale factories were built with the hope that China’s vast manpower could replace the machines used in other countries, eliminating the need for expensive, large-scale industrial plants. The most notorious examples were the backyard furnaces built in every village to smelt steel in small, low-tech operations. In the larger factories, workers put in longer hours and developed new homegrown innovative techniques to increase output.


Confirming Mao’s enthusiasm, the program at first seemed to work. In the first months industrial production was greater than anticipated. An excited Mao so incited new, higher targets from lower levels. Given Mao’s old belief in “from the masses to the masses,” this attention to the people’s estimate of the situation seemed to confirm his growing disenchantment with the central bureaucracy and heighten his expectations that through the masses he would reinvigorate the country.

He was, of course, smart enough to understand that the lower levels might simply be following the newest political line; but reports from experts and Mao’s own information gleaned from visits to factories confirmed everything he was hearing. The technicians at the Ministry of Metallurgy declared that, on the basis of their investigations, China could overtake Great Britain not in fifteen years but in ten. On a visit to a steel plant in Sichuan, Mao was shown how the workers had radically increased production by rebuilding the old machinery. A provincial leader excitedly told a skeptical Mao that the peasants were so enthusiastic about the new program that by overhauling irrigation works and changing production methods, they were achieving yields as much as seventy times higher. Soon stories even more preposterous began to pour in from around the country, many endorsed by reputable scientific organizations.35


Mao may have been naive to believe these reports, but as Li Zhisui, his doctor, has confirmed, local officials went to elaborate lengths during Mao’s visits to show him what he hoped to see. When Mao traveled extensively to inspect progress in the countryside, as he did at the beginning of the Great Leap, he used a special train and was accompanied by a large entourage. Local officials were alerted to his visit well in advance. They deliberately kept Mao away from real people and went out of their way to sugar-coat their situations. On one trip during the Great Leap:


The party secretaries had ordered furnaces constructed everywhere along the rail route, stretching out for ten li on either side, and the women were dressed so colorfully, in reds and greens, because they had been ordered to dress that way. In Hubei, party secretary Wang Renzhong had ordered the peasants to remove rice plants from faraway fields and transplant them along Mao’s route, to give the impression of a wildly abundant crop. The rice was planted so closely together that electric fans had to be set up around the fields to circulate air in order to prevent the plants from rotting.37

High-level officials such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping—for whom local officials offered less showboating—were equally enthusiastic. So Mao’s excitement at the party’s achievements with un-Stalinist methods, while misguided, is at least understandable. He himself said that though his enthusiasm might sound “madly arrogant,” he did not think that he and his colleagues were “madmen” but “revolutionaries who seek the truth from facts…uniting the Russian revolutionary zeal with the American spirit of realism!” He began to feel that if China’s huge population went to work, the country could “catch up with the United States in fifteen years.”38


Without discounting the horrific damage done by Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, one cannot overlook the positive impact of these movements, which gave birth to the present China—indeed, they are more responsible for China’s change in recent years than its trade with the West.

The Great Leap did contribute to China's development.


The two letters and other documentary evidence clearly show that there were other CCP leaders at various levels that were so irrational that Mao had to restrain them or to bypass them. They also show that the Great Leap Forward was a genuine policy mistake and that Mao was not the only person who was responsible. However, ever since the post-Mao reforms Chinese historiography has been attempting to place the blame on Mao alone. It became inconvenient to expose those who acted more recklessly than Mao but were rehabilitated after his death.

By 1976 China had laid down a sound industrial and agricultural base for an economic take off. These facts are proven and accepted by both Chinese and Western scholars in their macro studies (Meisner 1986, Lardy 1978, Rawski 1993, Chow 1985, Perkins 1985, and Field 1986) as well as micro case studies (Forster 2003, Bramall 1993 and Endicott 1989)

Mao first raised concerns about overwork and over-enthusiasm at the Wuchang Conference in late 1958. And, "as early as 29 April 1959, Mao wrote a letter to address six crucial issues about food, grain production and the truthful reporting of production outputs, all stressing moderation and calling for cooling down the Great Leap hype."