By Lynne Ann Hartnett, Villanova University
In 1957, Mao Zedong announced the Great Leap Forward, a plan to speed up industrialization. The state had only recently organized peasants on large collective farms, called people’s communes, in an effort to streamline and increase economic production. Now, Mao announced that the communes would shift from agriculture to steel production. The goal was for China to double its steel output in one year.
From Agriculture to Steel Production to Famine
Mao worked on consolidating the power and authority of the communist regime because he was about to embark on a new stage of socialist construction in the country. Lacking financial capital, the communist regime marshalled human capital. All Chinese were called on to do their part. Predictably, the outcome was a disaster.
On agricultural communes around the country, backyard blast furnaces arose. Rural workers were required to melt any metal objects they could get their hands on. Propaganda posters depicted idyllic scenes of agricultural communes churning out ample food, while in the background furnaces efficiently produced the steel needed for modernization. But crops were left to rot, and the communal dining halls set up to feed the people soon struggled to find food.
While the government censored news of the famine, scholars estimate that between 15 million and 45 million Chinese died.
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No Lessons Learned
The man-made famine that resulted from Mao’s Great Leap Forward was one of the deadliest in world history. Parallels to the example of the Soviet Union were clear and not in a flattering way.
Stalin’s collectivization and industrialization campaign in the early 1930s had precipitated a famine that killed five to seven million Soviet people. Judging from the Chinese experience in the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Communist Party continued to emulate their Soviet counterparts without learning from their mistakes.
Meanwhile, the Sino-Soviet relationship cooled. Moscow was less than enthusiastic in its support of China’s vast expansion of agrarian communes and the implementation of the Great Leap Forward. And by 1960, Soviet criticism was pronounced. While a decade earlier the Chinese communists might have deferred to the Soviets, not now.
Sino-Soviet Relations Cool
In spite of the material assistance Nikita Khrushchev had provided China, Soviet leaders viewed the Chinese with suspicion. And the feeling was mutual.
Mao viewed Khrushchev’s program of de-Stalinization and cultural thaw skeptically, and considered the Soviet policy of peaceful co-existence with the United States a sacrilege. Chinese leadership, which formerly had leaned on the Soviet Union as a socialist mentor, was by late 1960 describing the Soviet Communist Party as ‘opportunist and revisionist’, and lacking ‘any deep knowledge of Marxism’.
The embittered relationship led the countries to vie for leadership of the socialist world. And while the Soviets already enjoyed a number of notable accomplishments, including their achievements in space, Mao saw China’s path to prominence resting in the Great Leap Forward.
Its failures were too great to ignore by 1961, however. And Mao faced a surge of pressure in the Chinese party, triggering “the most serious split … since the Communists had taken power”. By 1962, the Great Leap Forward was a thing of the past.
Mao’s Resignation
Mao engaged in some half-hearted self-criticism. In 1959, he even resigned as head of state, replaced by Liu Shaoqi, a communist liaison between China and the Soviets in earlier years who’d overseen a purge of regional authorities in the 1950s.
But Mao’s authority wasn’t in jeopardy. He retained his supreme position as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, and he bided his time until he could exact revenge against those he believed to be disloyal to him.
Liu suggested that some balance be restored by rehabilitating those deemed to have been unjustly persecuted in anti-rightist campaigns. This brought Liu respect and popularity. But Mao saw this as a challenge to his own authority and struck back.
Initiation of the Cultural Revolution
Reasserting the need for continuing ‘class struggle’, Mao suggested that Liu Shaoqi was engaged in doctrinal revisionism and reactionary impulses and he decided the party needed a cleansing. So, Mao now initiated another revolution: The Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution got under way with two seemingly minor events. In June 1966, an editorial appeared in The People’s Daily newspaper calling on the Chinese people to sweep away the demons of the past. Over the next month, students at Peking University answered the call.
Led by a philosophy instructor, who claimed that university leadership was full of secret revisionists, students sought to out hidden counterrevolutionaries. Liu Shaoqi and another senior party leader, Deng Xiaoping, reprimanded the students for excess. But Mao punished his two lieutenants, insulting them as Chinese Khrushchevs.
Common Questions about the Great Leap Forward
Stalin’s collectivization and industrialization campaign in the early 1930s had precipitated a famine that killed five to seven million Soviet people. In China, while the government censored news of the famine, scholars estimate that between 15 million and 45 million Chinese died.
Mao viewed Khrushchev’s program of de-Stalinization and cultural thaw skeptically, and considered the Soviet policy of peaceful co-existence with the United States a sacrilege. Chinese leadership, which formerly had leaned on the Soviet Union as a socialist mentor, was by late 1960 describing the Soviet Communist Party as ‘opportunist and revisionist’, and lacking ‘any deep knowledge of Marxism’.
In 1959, when Mao Zedong resigned as head of state, he was replaced by Liu Shaoqi.
