HIST103: World History (1600–Present)

The Great Leap Forward was the name given to the Second Five-Year Plan, which was scheduled to run from 1958–1963, though the name is now generally limited to the first three years of this period. Mao unveiled the Great Leap Forward at a meeting in January 1958 in Nanning. The central idea behind the Great Leap was that the rapid development of China's agricultural and industrial sectors should take place in parallel. The hope was to industrialize by making use of the massive supply of cheap labor and avoid having to import heavy machinery.

To achieve the targets, Mao advocated that a further round of collectivization modeled on the USSR's "Third Period" was necessary in the Chinese countryside, where the existing collectives would be merged into huge people's communes. An experimental commune was established at Chayashan in Henan in April 1958. Here, for the first time, private plots were entirely abolished, and communal kitchens were introduced. At the Politburo meetings in August 1958, it was decided that these people's communes would become the new form of economic and political organization throughout rural China.

Astonishingly for such a dramatic social change, by the end of the year, approximately 25,000 communes had been set up, each with an average of 5,000 households. The communes were relatively self-sufficient cooperatives where wages and money were replaced by work points. Besides agriculture, they incorporated some light industry and construction projects.

Mao saw grain and steel production as the key pillars of economic development. He predicted that within 15 years of the start of the Great Leap, China's steel production would surpass that of the United Kingdom. In the August 1958 Politburo meetings, it was decided that steel production would be set to double within the year, most of the increase coming through backyard steel furnaces. Mao was shown an example of a backyard furnace in Hefei, Anhui, in September 1958 by Provincial First Secretary Zeng Xisheng. The unit was claimed to be manufacturing high-quality steel (though, in fact, the finished steel had probably been manufactured elsewhere).

Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood. Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces, the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants' houses.

Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the "scrap" for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help with iron production, as were the workers at many factories, schools, and even hospitals. As could have been predicted by anyone with any experience in steel production or basic knowledge of metallurgy, the output consisted of low-quality lumps of pig iron, which was of negligible economic worth.

Mao's deep distrust of intellectuals and faith in the power of the mass mobilization of peasants led him to order this massive countrywide effort without consulting expert opinion. Moreover, the experience of the intellectual classes following the 100 Flowers Campaign led those aware of the folly of such a plan to not dare voice criticism. According to his private doctor, Li Zhisui, Mao and his entourage visited traditional steel works in Manchuria in January 1959, where he found out that high-quality steel could only be produced in large-scale factories using reliable fuel such as coal. However, he decided not to order a halt to the backyard steel furnaces so as not to dampen the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses. The program was only quietly abandoned much later that year.

Substantial effort was expended during the Great Leap Forward on large-scale but often poorly planned capital construction projects, such as irrigation works, often built without input from trained engineers.

On the communes, a number of radical and controversial agricultural innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao. Many of these were based on the ideas of now-discredited Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko and his followers. The policies included close cropping, whereby seeds were sown far more densely than normal on the incorrect assumption that seeds of the same class would not compete with each other. Deep plowing (up to 2m deep) was encouraged in the mistaken belief that this would yield plants with extra large root systems. Even more disastrously, it was argued that a proportion of fields should be left fallow.

The initial impact of the Great Leap Forward was discussed at the Lushan Conference in July/August 1959. Although many of the more moderate leaders had reservations about the new policy, the only senior leader to speak out openly was Marshal Peng Dehuai, leader of China's military forces during the Korean War. Mao used the conference to dismiss Peng from his post as Defense Minister and denounce both Peng (who came from a poor peasant family) and his supporters as bourgeois and launch a nationwide campaign against "rightist opportunism." Peng was replaced by Lin Biao, who began a systematic purge of Peng's supporters from the military.