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The Great Leap Forward Period
in China, 1958-1960
Economic development under the People's Republic of China government started with about 150 development projects planned, financed and staffed by the Soviet Union. When political ideological differences between Mao Zedong and Nikata Khrushchev led to a split the 15,000 Soviet engineers and staff on the development projects were withdrawn and the blueprints for the projects destroyed. China did not have the technological and financial resources to complete these projects on its own and Mao Zedong was made conscious of how vulnerable was in depending upon outside aid, even from communist regimes.
It was then that the conviction developed with Mao that China would industrialize on its own, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps so to speak. Mao was also aware that the first attempt to create a socialist economy was brought to a halt in the Soviet Union in 1921 when peasants reacted to confiscation of their grain harvest by declining to plant and produce as much grain. Mao was also aware that when Stalin began his five-year plans he collectivized agriculture in order to have control over what was planted and produced. Mao should have also been aware, although perhaps he was not, that the collectivization program in the Soviet Union was a great failure in terms of production and that a severe famine occured in the Ukraine afterwards. Nevertheless Mao called for the Chinese peasants to be organized into communes. This, in effect, took away the land that had been distributed to the peasants in the years immediately after 1949. The peasants had been urged to confiscate the lands of the landowners and distribute it to the peasants that farmed it. This land distribution program was extremely popular with the peasants and contributed to their support of Mao's Communist Party. But the peasants had the land for less that ten years before the State took it away from them.
First, peasants were organized into cooperatives of 20 to 40 families. This was at the village level. Next the cooperatives were replaced by county-wide collectives involving hundreds of thousands of people. In addition to calling for the creation of communes Mao urged the peasants to build backyard blastfurnaces to make iron and steel for tools. The peasants were supposed to melt down scrap metal to make useful items such as tools and utensils. In practice the program worked backwards with peasants melting down useful items to produce unusable masses of metal. This happened because the State exhorted the peasants to increase production from the backyard blast furnaces and when they ran out of scrap they started melting down anything they could find, including tools and utensils. Some of this destruction of useful objects to increase the production from the backyard blastfurnaces might be attributed to enthusiasm but probably more of it was due to there being quotas of production from the furnaces that had to be met. Communist leaders at the local level faced with possible personal punishment for not meeting the quota or destruction of useful items of metal and of wood for fuel usually would choose to try to meet the quota. But the mixture of metals and the impurities in the fuel produced metal that could not be formed into anything useful. The metal was too brittle.
The more incidious consequence of the backyard blastfurnaces and other nonagricultural projects of the Great Leap Forward was that they took labor away from food production and led to a shortfall in food. China was, as always in recent history, on the edge of subsistence and any decrease in food production means privation if not starvation.
To make matters worse the centralized control resulted in no one with the authority to change things being informed of the decline in food production. The commune leaders were under pressure to exceed past production and when production declined they did report it. They, in fact, reported what the higher authorities wanted to hear. Thus the policy errors that were leading to food shortfalls went on beyond the point when anyone could do anything about them. The central government made things even worse for the peasants by taking a share based upon the falsified production figures and thus leaving the peasants too little to survive on.
In addition to the decline in food production due to the diversion of effort away from agriculture there was losses in food production because of the erroneous policies promoted by the State. One of these idocies was close planting. If two plants are set too close to each other there is not enough nutrients in the soil to feed both and both die. The State promoted close planting of grain to increase productivity. The initial growth of a plant derives from the nutrient stored in the seed itself. With close planting the initial germination produces spectacular results, but when the growth of the plant has to depend upon nutrients drawn from the soil the close planting produces failures. During the Great Leap Forward there developed a competition for creating the most striking demonstrations of close planting. The record was probably the case which produced a famous photograph of children standing on top of a wheat field that could hold their weight. Jasper Becker, in his history of the Great Leap Forward era Hungry Ghosts tells that an interviewee told him that the picture was faked. There was a bench hidden in the wheat below the children's feet that supported them.
Jasper Becker in Hungry Ghosts traces the foolishness of close planting to the fraudulent science of the Soviet Union. T.D. Lysenko was a quack who got the support of Joseph Stalin and ruled over Soviet genetics for twenty five years. Among the many erroneous notions promoted by Lysenko and which had to be accepted in Marxist countries was his "law of the life of species" which said that plants of the same species do not compete with each other but instead help each other to survive. This was linked to the Marxist notion of classes in which members of the same class do not compete but instead help each other survive. So Marxist ideology seemed to support the notion that the denser grain was planted the better it was for the grain. But in reality this close planting led to whithering of the plants after the initial germination phase. Lysenko was responsible for many other foolish notions most based upon the precept that environment not genetics determine plant characteristics. Lysenko argued that if you grew plants a little farther north each year they would adapt to the climate and eventually you would be able to grow oranges in the arctic. All of the Lysenko nonsense had to accepted in the Soviet Union and promoted in propaganda as scientific truth. The Marxists in China apparently believed it was the truth. The reality was that this nonsense resulted in less production of food under conditions of bare survival.
Some tried to communicate to Mao the failures of the Great Leap Forward but were denounced as traitors. Marshal Peng Dehuai who commanded the Chinese troops in the Korean War was one of those denounced and branded as a counter-revolutionary by Mao. Peng captured the situation well in a poem:
The millet is scattered over the ground.
The leaves of the sweet potato are withered.
The young and old have gone to smelt iron.
To harvest the grain there are children and old women.
How shall we get through the next year?
Peng Dehuai
This version of the poem quoted in Jasper Becker's Hungry Ghosts
Famine ensued and was particularly severe in some areas. The people in these areas were forbidden to leave their area and so were doomed to starvation. Altogether about thirty million people died in the famine. The famine was caused by the shortfall in food production but this was a result of the bad policies and centralization of power in the central government. It was made worse by the refusal to admit the problem. During the time peasants were starving in the country side the government was shipping to grain to the Soviet Union to repay loans. Some grain also rotted in warehouses in the cities where it was taken from the communes.
This famine was kept secret from the outside world until China began opening up to the outside world and demographers began analyzing the the population statistics.
When Mao finally accepted the fact that the Great Leap Forward had failed he left the task of achieving an economic recovery to Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai. They did bring about the recovery but in 1966 Mao sought to return to absolute power again. The power struggle took the form of the Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/greatleap.htm
If we cannot have peace, let us create for ourselves a solitude and call it peace.
Doesn't this topic belong in "Capitalism vs. Socialism"???
Listen to the worm of doubt for it speaks truth.
The Redstar2000 Papers
Also see this NEW SITE:@nti-dialectics
Not at all. This is an aspect of History the world must face.
If we cannot have peace, let us create for ourselves a solitude and call it peace.
Mao was a fool. Have you read Wild Swans, Sulla? It's a good book.
Would you consider yourself left or right, Sulla?
I find it ironic that supporters of authoritarians cite the stupidity or ignorance of "the people" as the need for authority, and in this case it was the stupidity which cause this massive failure. If Mao was truly authoritarian he would have stamped his authority onto the Great Leap Forward by making sure things were done right.
The peasants had no idea how to make steel. Schools and hospitals ceased operation for steel which had no practical use.
-insert witty phrase in between two equals sign here-
Sulla is on the right CIKI.
Though I do agree with him that this should go under history.
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror... --- Mark Twain
Interesting story. By the way, China's got a new Politburo. I think.
The prolonged barrage engulfed Zero-One in the glow of a thousand suns. But unlike their former masters with their delicate flesh, the machines had little to fear of the bombs' radiation and heat. Thus did Zero-One's troops advance outwards in every direction. And one after another, mankind surrendered its territories. So the leaders of men conceived of their most desperate strategy yet. A final solution: the destruction of the sky.
-- The 2nd Renaissance (Part2), Animatrix
Suffianr,
I read something in the papers about that too. A new premier has been elected and it appears that no one really knows who he is.
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror... --- Mark Twain
The new guy is Hu Jintao. He's power is still very unstable, because of the 9-members of the Politburo, 6 are Jiang Zeming's men.
\"Socialism is not an ideology, it is a state of mind.\"
The headlines about two weeks ago in the Toronto Star's [bold]World[/quote] section said "RED CAPITALISM IN CHINA" and talked about how China is joining forces with the United States (ideoligcally not politically). This made me think of Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card where the "United States is only the tail of the Chinese economic dog"
yeah but a new ruler isnt going to change fuck all. china isnt communist.mao would be dead pissed off. think- he condemned deng xiaoping for following "the capitalist road". what would he say now then? i hate it when magazines say things like "chinas economy is growing incredibly". thats from a capitalist point of view. maybe gdp has increased, but so has inequality. people ar flocking to the cities in order to live the capitalist dream, leaving the countryside in a mess,and creating problems for the city. development is taking place with foreign investors, seeing the worlds biggest economy "opening up".
in my opinion, red china died in 1976.
"Speak not of revolution until you are willing to eat rats to survive" The Last Poets
Defnyddiwch Gwgl!
Help a poor amateur musician: www.myspace.com/tffync
Yeah, China's been state capitalist for about 20-odd years now.
Mao was a good revolutionary, but a bad leader.
“There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us.” – Che Guevara
“We still believe that the struggle of Ireland for freedom is a part of the world-wide upward movement of the toilers of the earth, and we still believe that the emancipation of the working class carries within it the end of all tyranny – national, political and social.” – James Connolly
I'm not about to waste my time reading the whole post, I've read more than enough accounts of the Great Leap.
It was a huge mistake, but imho an atrocity requires the will or intention to wreak havoc. No one is going to tell me Mao suddenly decided to kill those people for no reason, it was simply one of the worst miscalculations of recent times.
--- G.
A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death
- from Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'
Agreed, it was stupidity. But it was also arrogance and pride; Mao was repeatedly offered evidence of what the Great Leap Forward was doing to his country.
\"It\'s crazy, it seems it\'ll never let up, but please - you gotta keep ya head up\" - 2pac \"keep ya head up\"
Good article. We must remember that a good revolutionary doesn't need to be a good countryleader.
Let no one charge that socialists have arrayed class against class in this struggle. That has been done long since in the evolution of capitalist society. One class is small and rich and the other large and poor....One consists of capitalists and the other of workers. These two classes are at war. Every day of peace is at the expense of labor. There can be no peace and good will between these two essentially antagonistic economic classes. - Debs
In fact, rarely is....
\"It\'s crazy, it seems it\'ll never let up, but please - you gotta keep ya head up\" - 2pac \"keep ya head up\"
