Perhaps the frenzy of innovation and optimism was a knock-on effect of the anti-rightist campaign that preceded the Great Leap and existed as a continuing feature throughout the strategy. It created a supercharged political atmosphere with strong overtones of class struggle. As mentioned earlier, Mao fixed a political situation where to disagree or even adopt neutrality towards Mao’s plans would immediately result in the label of a ‘rightist’. To be rightist would mean public humiliation, social exclusion, harsh punishment or even death. The measuring factor that ensured you were deemed political ‘correct’ was the level of enthusiasm with which you tackled your projects. Speed was an adequate quantity to measure enthusiasm by, and soon outrageously overambitious targets were set by the communes. This extended to grain and steel output, through the back yard furnaces implemented by the central government in order to maintain light industry. Interestingly, contrary to popular belief, in the early stages of the Great Leap Forward Mao was anti-haste. During the spring and summer of 1957, the emphasis was on “better” and “more economically” to the virtual exclusion of “more” and “faster”. Mao and Chun Yun were not advocating rapid growth, but about thrift and modest investment. It seems that as the Great Leap’s popularity grew, or as Mao’s power over the country grew, so did the haste of production and ambitiousness of the targets. In November 1957 the Central Committee announced that they had “mapped out its plan to surpass the United States within fifteen years in the output of iron and other main industrial products”. This announcement was similar to that of the Soviet’s calling they would overtake Britain within fifteen years, therefore it is probably that the imitation resulted from the Moscow meetings of 1957. Mao’s imitations of Soviet Russia will be discussed in more detail and breadth below, however, for the time being the mimicking signified Mao’s desire to be in close alliance with Khrushchev. One question remains obvious in this situation – the famine that wrecked China stemmed from the same policy prescriptions that Stalin applied to Russia. How is it then, Mao chose to ignore the example Russia had set, depicting the consequences of the Great Leap? Perhaps Mao considered death as the natural sacrifice for socialist utopia, and remained willing to lead his followers to their fate.
Combined with the frenzy of fear and nationalistic values was the underlying theme of ignorance, both on Mao’s (and the government’s) behalf and on the peasant’s. The empirical line that allows scientists to separate reality from fantasy through their research seemed to dissolve into ridicule, when people stared claiming they had successfully accomplished the impossible. In Guangzhou, children and teachers crossed a pumpkin with a papaya, and runner beans with soybeans. Super-big plants emerged, as described in China Youth News, “The grains of sorghum are as big as those of corn…giving a much greater yield”. Extraordinary animals were born, when Yorkshire sows were crossed with a Holstein Friesian cow using artificial insemination. These examples may not have had any long lasting effects over the outcome of the Great Leap, but reflect the mind frame of the people at the time. The consequences were much more serious however, when the people were convinced by the state and perhaps, by themselves even, that there were huge grain surpluses. Mao encouraged peasants to eat all they wanted, and Deng Xiaoping confirmed that “we can all have as much as we want”. Of course, the quotes were fabrications in order to please Mao, and food that was supposed to last six months was consumed in six weeks. The ‘logic’ that underpinned the incredible agricultural and breeding accomplishments lay in the work of a Russian pseudo-scientist called Lysenko. He was praised by Pravda in 1927 as a ‘barefoot scientist’, and went on to make ridiculous, yet trusted discoveries. Mao, an ignorant in agricultural techniques, read Lysenko’s work and issued statements instructing the communes to follow “Lysenko’s Eight-Point Plan”. Once again, Mao was demonstrating his willingness to copy Russia’s policies and use their economic strategies as models for China.
Mao not only viewed the Great Leap as an economic transition for China, leading it to industrialization. A major aspect of the strategy was it perpetrated and idealized Mao’s desire to push China into Socialism. An obvious feature that embodied Mao’s ideals was the formation of communes. For the Chinese they epitomized the essence of socialism – everyone was fed and clothed, and intellectuals mixed with the land workers to ensure they related to equality. In 1956 Mao had already declared basic victory of socialism over capitalism on the basis of ownership transformation in agriculture through the collectivization program that eventually developed into the ‘people’s communes’. Khrushchev’s “De-Stalinization” speech at the Soviet Party’s 20th Congress caught the Chinese by surprise. One of the most important effects of Khrushchev’s more moderate policies in order to achieve a more “peaceful” transition to socialism was that it made Mao the more powerful advocate of Marxist-Leninist theory. It fuelled his desire to accelerate the Great Leap to breakneck speeds, moving China through the advanced forms of socialism. Mao recognized that China’s situation was different to Russia’s as it was short on capital and long on manpower. Although Mao admitted that the Soviet-style economy was a basis for China at the beginning, after the 20th Congress Mao specifically pointed out his desire for China to develop at a speed even faster than the Russians were demonstrating. It is clear that Mao perceived himself as the most powerful and advanced socialist thinker and advocator which ties in with his personal political agenda. His consolidation of power preceding and during the Great Leap served not only the Chinese economy and social structure but also his position in the global political world as the supreme socialist figure.
To conclude, the intentions of the Great Leap Forward were ultimately to industrialize and develop China, allowing it to be completely self-reliant from Western capitalist countries. One example of this intention is the decrease in grain imports and increase in exports during the height of the famine. Agriculture output was meant to increase (later at ridiculous amounts) in order to fund the heavy industrialization program in the cities. Contrary to the Soviet model though, Mao realized that there was not enough to invest solely in heavy industry, therefore light industry was to continue in the countryside. Eventually, it was hoped that as more funds went to heavy industry it would come to support agriculture through inputs such as chemical fertilizer and become “the engine of agricultural growth”. In order to increase the agricultural output with the minimum investment, Mao established total control over the population, creating a tense overcharged political atmosphere obligating people to adhere to his policies and dictating. This enabled him to mobilize the masses of peasant labor, following up by lowering the design standards and avoiding a one-sided emphasis on the most advanced technology, speeding up growth and limit funds for nonessential construction. The savings could then be reinvested into priority projects. However, to try and raise agricultural (as well as industrial) output and productivity through small improvements in traditional tools and methods of production, and through appeal to the latent talents of workers and peasants is not in itself enough in capital-deficient underdeveloped countries. The Great Leap, however, distorted the idea by making it compulsory, claiming too much for it, and introducing into it an element of haste. It can be argued though, that the intention (in the most simplified form) of the Great Leap Forward was fundamentally good. The government wanted to see China prosper and quickly take over the West, allowing it to be completely self-sufficient. The limitation on this assertion though is it does not consider the impacts of the Western involvement and pressures on China – though arguably, they were simply a drop in the ocean as one of the features of the Maoist paradigm is that China disappeared into eerie isolation from the Western world.
At the time, the government blamed the fallings of the Great Leap on two factors: the Soviet withdrawal and unusually bad weather. However, firstly, the Soviets withdrew their advisory and financial aid in 1961, when the shortcomings were already obvious. In addition, the withdrawal hit the industrial sector mainly, rather than the agricultural sector. It is also highly possible that the Chinese wanted the Russians out of China so that they could not report back to Khrushchev that the whole country was starving. Secondly, the weather was not that bad over the course of the Great Leap. In fact, in 1958 there was a record harvest, but the peasants were too busy manning the backyard furnaces to gather the grain. In any case, many peasants had thrown their scythes into the melting pot and therefore were physically unable to cut the harvest. It is also likely that the flooding and severe droughts could have been caused by the ignorant water-irrigation installations, making the conditions man-made.
The key element in the failure of the Great Leap is unquestionably the political and bureaucratic tensions that shrouded the Party. The cult of Mao unsurprisingly weakened the positions of Mao’s top colleagues, combining with their own fear of being denounced as a “rightist”, thus allowing Mao to continue his work. Mao himself was gripped with his obsession of transforming China into a socialist utopia, in the least time, with the most output, and most efficiently. With what was viewed as an ideological corruption of the Soviet Union, Mao rose to superiority, justified by his Marxist-Leninist ideological knowledge. The cult of Mao was significant because it was made possible through a series of complicated turn of events and patterns in history. Arguably, it could be pinpointed to the Chinese culture, ever suspicious of external forces (as they are later compared to their Japanese neighbors, who in contrast, flourished through Western involvement), mostly uneducated and still gripped by the optimism of revolution. From an outsider’s point of view, the Chinese seemed ignorant, ready to believe anything that Mao told them, even to the point where they might have convinced themselves of their own lies and fabrications. However, this is what made the Great Leap unique and catastrophic – “the essence was the breakneck speed generated by ideology and mass mobilization”. Mao’s role in the disaster must not be underestimated though. The crucial factor that sealed the fate of the 30 million plus who starved to death was Mao’s interpretation of the events from the perspective of late 1957 and early 1958. His consistent refusal to acknowledge the famine raises questions surrounding the actual control Mao had over the policies of the Great Leap Forward. It is possible that he was simply reaction to crisis after crisis, intent on satisfying his own personal agenda to remain in total and complete power. For this, he was willing to sacrifice the lives of many. In themselves, the policies were not bad. However, when surrounded by the bureaucratic tensions where key officials were denied the “right to speak”, what resulted cannot be viewed as anything else but a man-made disaster. Within a cloak of fear and oppression Mao’s Great Leap emerged, but like castles built on sand it too would crumble, but with devastating consequences.
Bibliography
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Becker, J. (1996) Hungry Ghosts, China’s Secret Famine (John Murray: London)
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Teiwes, F. with Sun, W. (1999) China’s Road to Disaster (East Gate: New York)
Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts, London, John Murray (Publishers), 1996, p. xi.
Frederick Teiwes with Warren Sun, China’s Road to Disaster, New York, East Gate, 1999, p. 182.
Anna Louise Strong, China’s Fight for Grain, FLP, Beijing, 1963, pp. 12. 13.
Quoted from a Red Guard magazine in Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, The Great Leap Forward, 1958 – 60, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983.
Jan Prybyla, The Political Economy of Communist China, Pennsylvania, International Textbook Company, 1970, p. 265.
Niu Chung-huang, China Will Overtake Britain, Beijing, FLP, 1958, p. 5.
Edward Rice, Mao’s Way, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972, p. 161.
David Bachman, Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China: The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 117-19, 121-30.
Prybyla, 1970, pp. 265-6.
