Explain why the Great Leap Forward failed?

thinking again. Small-scale industry was invoked into villages. The peasants of China were to get organised to improve agriculture and would make China a powerful nation agriculturally and industrially. This idea seems brilliantly simple and plausible if like Mao you relied on informants to tell you what you want to hear. Mao set up the communes by joining the co-operatives. This got rid of private land and property, family life was replaced with an army style regime. The people were taught to follow orders and not to make their own decisions, which created a population of non-thinkers. None of the problems therefore, were ever questioned, and so never solved. People did as they were told even if it was obviously wrong, pointless or going to get them killed. By the end of 1958, 40,000 communes were in place and almost all of the population were in them. This extreme organisation appeared a success at first, steel production practically doubled. Yet it was a failure that would cost China millions of lives. In 1960 Mao fell out with Khruschov, the Russian president, and so his alliance with him was severed. He removed his advisors, scientists and engineers from China, and because Mao believed that advanced education would breed a rebellion against communism, the entire population was under educated. This meant it was dependent on the expertise of the Russian scientists to advance, without them, the systems problems weren’t solved. Political beliefs and the beliefs of the Leaders took precedence over common sense. Communes were set targets that were impossible to achieve, and Commune Leaders that complained were branded as nationalists. The steel that was produced was too weak, and many buildings made from it collapsed. The farming machinery was produced too quickly and was made out of the weak steel, so as soon as it was used it fell apart. People got injured after falling asleep on the job, from working too many hours and many workers had been taken from their fields to work in “backyard production” which meant the production of food was greatly reduced. 1959 was a very bad year for harvesting in terms of weather. There were Floods and droughts, which reduced the yield of grain to only 170million tons; starvation soon ravaged the country. In 1960 even less was produced, 144million tones; 9million people died through starvation. Rationing was finally introduced, forcing people to live on the minimum amount of food. All these problems were never questioned, the rule of one leader is devastating, because there were so many things to be organised and sorted by Mao that he never had time to go over and think through them all. Mao admitted that the Great Leap forward had been a failure, but he also asked everyone else to look at their own failures. So late in 1960 the Great Leap forward was abandoned, private land was reinstated and communes were cut down. The main failure of the Great Leap forward was the impossible feats asked of the communes, the targets they were set led them to produce unusable and wasteful equipment and materials that ended up more of a hindrance than help. If the targets were set lower and to a higher standard then it the country would have been far better off. Once again the greediness and over ambitiousness of human nature spoils the communist system. If Mao hadn’t set such high demand for industry and not lost concentrated on the importance of agriculture and food production the country starvation problems would have been solved, fewer people would have died and a better foundation for a great nation would have been built. In total 30million people died through the simple mismanagement of workloads.