How successful was the great leap forward in achieving Mao's aims?
Only months after Mao Zelong launched the great leap forward, things started to go wrong. Everywhere, party workers urged people to produce more and to produce it faster. As a result, old and overworked machines fell apart under the strain. Factory workers fell asleep at their benches and suffered accidents through careless brought on by exhaustion.
It wasn’t only the factories that the Great Leap forward failed to take off. The backyard steel campaign also failed. Three million of the eleven million tonnes of steel made in backyard furnaces were too impure for industrial use and had to be thrown away as scrap. But worse was to come. So many furnaces were built that, eventually, one person in ten was employed in making steel. This took people away from the fields, reducing the amount of food that could be grown. The furnaces also used so much of the country’s coal supplies that railway locomotives had no fuel to run on. And so much extra steel was made that there were not enough railway trains to take it to the industrial centres where it was needed. The great leap forward failed in the countryside as bad as it did in the towns. The weather in 1958 was excellent there were still two problems that prevented the harvest from being a good one. Firstly, so many peasants were working in industry, in particular the backyard steel making, that there were too few people to harvest the crops properly. Secondly, party officials ignored this and claimed that the grain harvest had been a record 260 million tonnes. As a result of this many communal eating halls started giving the peasants very generous meals, using up valuable food stocks. None of this would have mattered if the next year’s harvest had been superb. But the weather in 1959 was worse. In some parts of china there were floods, in other parts there was drought the result was a harvest of only 170 million tonnes. Before long, people were going hungry. Some began to starve. To complete the farming crisis, the weather in 1960 was even worse than in 1959. The bad weather, combined with the anarchy caused by the Great Leap forward, reduced the harvest to 144 million tonnes. This led to a major famine, killing around 9 million people in 1960 alone. The government set up a rationing system under which most people were given a maximum of 125 grams of grain a day, but the death toll continued to rise. Between 1959 and 1962 some 20 million Chinese died of starvation and related diseases.
