HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen, both within China and outside by neoliberal critics as a major economic disaster, effectively acting as a "Great Leap Backward" that would affect China in the years to come. As inflated statistics reached planning authorities, orders were given to divert human resources into industry rather than agriculture. The official toll of excess deaths recorded in China for the years of the GLF is 14 million, but scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million.^[1]

The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years" and the Three Years of Natural Disasters. Many local officials were tried and publicly executed for giving out misinformation^[5].

Starting in the early 1980s, critics of the Great Leap added quantitative muscle to their arsenal. U.S. Government scholar Dr. Judith Banister published what became an influential article in the China Quarterly, and since then, estimates as high as 30 million deaths in the Great Leap Forward became common in the U.S. press.

During the Great Leap, the Chinese economy initially grew. Iron production increased 45 percent in 1958 and a combined 30 percent over the next two years but plummeted in 1961 and did not reach the previous 1958 level until 1964.

Despite the risks to their careers, some Communist Party members openly laid the blame for the disaster at the feet of the Party leadership and took it as proof that China must rely more on education, acquiring technical expertise, and applying bourgeois methods in developing the economy. Liu Shaoqi made a speech in 1962 at Seven Thousand Man's Assembly criticizing that "The economic disaster was 30 percent fault of nature, 70 percent human error".^[6] It was principally to crush this opposition that Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in early 1966.

Mao stepped down as State Chairman of the PRC in 1959, predicting he would take most of the blame for the failure of the Great Leap Forward, though he did retain his position as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Liu Shaoqi (the new PRC Chairman) and Deng Xiaoping (CCP General Secretary) were left in charge of executing measures to achieve economic recovery. Moreover, Mao's Great Leap Forward policy came under open criticism at a party conference in Lushan, Jiangxi Province.

The attack was led by Minister of National Defense Peng Dehuai, who had become troubled by the potentially adverse effect Mao's policies would have on the modernization of the armed forces. Peng argued that "putting politics in command" was no substitute for economic laws and realistic economic policy; unnamed party leaders were also admonished for trying to "jump into communism in one step." After the Lushan showdown, Peng Dehuai, who allegedly had been encouraged by Nikita Khrushchev to oppose Mao, was deposed and replaced by Lin Biao.

Additionally, this loss in Mao's regime meant that Mao became a "dead ancestor," as he labeled himself: a person who was respected but never consulted, occupying the political background of the Party. Furthermore, he also stopped appearing in public. All of this he later regretted as he relaunched his Cult of Personality with the Great Yangtze Swim.

In agrarian policy, the failures of food supply during the Great Leap were met by a gradual de-collectivization in the 1960s that foreshadowed further de-collectivization under Deng Xiaoping. Political scientist Meredith Woo-Cumings argues:

After the death of Mao and the start of Chinese economic reform under Deng Xiaoping, the tendency within the Chinese government was to see the Great Leap Forward as a major economic disaster and to attribute it to the cult of personality under Mao Zedong, and to regard it as one of the serious errors he made after the founding of the PRC.