The Great Leap Forward
The extraordinary number of deaths during the Chinese Revolution is difficult to fathom. The Soviet Union had a similar experience when Stalin forced the population to modernize Russia's agricultural and industrialization practices. Historians estimate that Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), mandatory collectivization, forced labor, and the famine that ensued caused the deaths of 18–30 million people in China.
Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1960 that aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform mainland China from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, industrialized communist society.
Mao Zedong based this program on the Theory of Productive Forces, a widely-used concept in communism and Marxism, placing primary emphasis on achieving abundance in a nominally socialist economy before real communism, or even real socialism, can have a hope of being achieved. It was allegedly necessitated by the fact that, despite the theoretical predictions of Marxism, China's revolution took place not in a modern, industrialized society but a poor, agrarian one. It was epitomized by the absurdity of rural farmers having backyard furnaces to increase national steel production (yet what was produced was nearly unusable pig iron).
The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen – both within China and outside – as a major economic and humanitarian disaster, with estimates of the number of people killed by famine during this period ranging from a minimum of 14 million to as many as 43 million.[1] This failure of ideology – based on ideological rigidity rather than pragmatic economic, social, and technical realities – led to disastrous social consequences and human costs in China.
Source: New World Encyclopedia, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Great_Leap_Forward
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