Great Leap Forward | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The Great Leap Forward was the campaign launched by the Chinese Communist leadership in 1958 to quickly catch up to and leapfrog over Great Britain and the United States. Having become disenchanted with the Soviet-style development strategy that prioritized heavy industry, China's leaders, particularly Mao Zedong (1893–1976), believed that massive social mobilization would allow China simultaneously to develop industry and agriculture. Unfortunately, the campaign ended in utter failure and caused what is today known as the Great Leap famine.

Any explanation of the Great Leap must begin with the ideological preferences of Mao and his colleagues. Mao's efforts to promote large collectives and communes were based on a belief in economies of scale and a desire to promote social equality. Even though Mao's earlier pursuit of progressively larger rural institutions, ranging from mutual-aid groups to cooperatives and then to collectives, had caused many disruptions in agricultural production, the disruptions were dismissed as temporary. Mao forged on with demands for larger collectives in the late 1950s.

The Chinese political system had no room for dissent at this time. Repeated political campaigns, particularly the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, had banished those who spoke up, primarily intellectuals, to hard labor and even imprisonment. Those who raised questions a little later about Great Leap policy practices, such as the defense minister Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), were persecuted as rightist opportunists. In such a political system, those who aspired to mobility on the political ladder of success watched for cues to Mao's preferences and eagerly supported everything that Mao liked.

Once Mao endorsed the term "people's commune" in early August 1958, local leaders and political activists raced to establish communes and competed to build ever-larger ones. The number of communes proliferated. In just two months, most provinces claimed a successful transition to people's communes. Rural China was organized into 26,500 gigantic communes, each averaging 4,756 households. The communes abolished private property and, in most cases, did away with all economic incentives. The commune mess hall epitomized the frenzy of the Great Leap. Commune members were encouraged to abandon their private kitchens, donate the pots and pans to backyard iron furnaces, and dine in communal mess halls so that women could join the labor force.

Amid the euphoria of Communist transition, China's leaders ceased to manage the economy but instead encouraged practices that in hindsight were downright criminal. The state statistical system stopped functioning and was replaced by wild claims of bountiful harvests. Such claims in turn engendered wildly exaggerated output forecasts and prompted prominent regional leaders such as Ke Qingshi (1902–1965) and Tan Zhenlin (1902–1983) to exhort peasants to eat as much as they could. As a consequence, the free-supply system was widely adopted, and the mess hall became the site of communal feasts in many places. The free-supply system induced overconsumption and waste of food, even while state grain procurement was increased sharply on the basis of wildly exaggerated output forecasts. With worsening Sino-Soviet relations, the Chinese leadership increased grain exports, again under the illusion of bountiful harvests, to accelerate China's debt payment to the Soviet Union.

Other practices, including the massive diversion of rural labor to backyard iron furnaces and water-conservation projects, led to gross neglect in harvesting the bumper crops of 1958 and contributed to the ensuing famine. By spring 1959, many communes, caught between higher government procurement and free supply, had exhausted their grain reserves and witnessed a collapse of production incentives. At this point, much could still have been done to avoid the worst of the famine. Unfortunately, during the Lushan Conference of 1959, in which Mao came down hard on Peng Dehuai, Mao unleashed a "second leap" and another push for commune mess halls. This further exacerbated the rural situation and undoubtedly contributed to the jump in China's mortality rates from 12 per 1,000 in 1958 to 14.6 per 1,000 in 1959 and 25.4 per 1,000 in 1960. Statistics reveal that those provinces that had a higher messhall participation rate at the end of 1959 also tended to have a higher mortality rate in 1960, the year that China had a net population loss of 10 million people.

The Great Leap famine was thus clearly rooted in politics rather than nature. Unfortunately, the peasants who had put their faith in Mao's regime were largely left to fend for themselves when they had exhausted their food supplies. The demographer Judith Banister estimated that the number of excess deaths over 1958–1961 was between 15 and 30 million. In aggregate numbers, the Great Leap famine is the worst famine in human history. The incidence of the famine was emphatically rural, with the grain producers becoming the main victims of famine.

The intensity and magnitude of the Great Leap famine far exceeded the Great Depression in the United States and produced a lasting change in Chinese preferences and behavior. It shattered any nascent beliefs that the rural people might have had about large rural organizations and led them to question government policies. It also prompted Mao and his colleagues to moderate rural policies and scale down the sizes of rural collective organizations. But the famine also induced fissures among the top leaders. As Mao turned his attention away from the economy, he launched the notorious Cultural Revolution in 1966.

While the basic collective institutions were maintained during Mao's lifetime, the famine profoundly undermined popular support for such institutions and laid the foundation for China's eventual decollectivization following Mao's death. Through the early 1980s, the provinces that had suffered more severely during the famine were less likely to adopt radical rural policies and institutions. Following Mao's death in 1976 and the defeat of radical leaders, farmers again turned to household contracting (contracting land to the household), particularly in those areas that had suffered the most during the famine. By the turn of the 1980s, the national leadership, now led by Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), had embraced rural decollectivization. The Great Leap famine was thus not just a monumental tragedy; it also laid the ground for institutional innovation. It is a great historical irony that the Great Leap Forward, launched to accelerate China's march toward communism, actually served to hasten the arrival of market reforms by precipitating the greatest famine in human history. The tragedy is that China had to go through such a terrible detour.

Cultural Revolution—China; Mao Zedong

Bachman, David. (1991) Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Banister, Judith. (1987) China's Changing Population. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

MacFarquhar, Roderick. (1983) The Great Leap Forward, 1958–1960. Vol. 2 of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press.

Teiwes, Frederick, and Warren Sun. (1999) China's Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders inthe Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward, 1955–1959. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Yang, Dali. (1996) Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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