Maos Great Leap Forward

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Maos Great Leap Forward
China From 1958-1962
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• Great Leap Forward of 1958-62. China's peasants
  were to be fully incorporated into the collective
  farm system and China was to launch a massive
  steel production campaign in every village and
  collective farm throughout the country to bring
  China into the industrial world within a handful
  of years.

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• Mao, who knew absolutely nothing about either
  technology or economics, got it into his head
  that China could be remade into a modern
  industrial power, surpassing both the United
  States and the Soviet Union, through sheer
  determination and physical effort. He thought
  that what had taken America or Great Britain or
  France a hundred years to achieve, in terms of
  industrial productive capability, could be
  matched in China in a mere five or ten years.

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• Tens of millions of people were taken out of farm
  production to construct canals, roads, bridges,
  dams, and railways all around China with little
  more than their bare hands. The vast number of
  these projects ended up being structurally
  unsound and unusable. China's industrial "leap"
  into the modern age was to be performed through
  the construction of steel-making furnaces in
  people's backyards. Every conceivable piece of
  metal, including essential farm equipment and
  household utensils for cooking and eating, was
  confiscated and literally thrown into the fire.
  All that came out were unusable lumps of steel.

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• Knowing nothing about agriculture, Mao insisted
  that all the food China needed could be produced
  in less time on a fraction of the land then under
  cultivation. To curry favor with the "Great
  Helmsman" in Beijing, provincial and local party
  leaders throughout China drew up production plans
  promising to deliver fantastically unrealistic
  quantities of wheat and rice. No only did the
  harvests fall far short of the projections, but
  they fell far below previous levels of output.
  With millions of people diverted for Mao's
  gigantic infrastructure projects and with the
  basic tools needed for farm production stripped
  out of the peasants' hands for steel
  construction, it was inevitable that agricultural
  yields would drastically decline.

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• But the local and regional party leaders were
  determined to meet their targets for delivering
  what had been promised to the chairman. To meet
  their targets, they reduced the amount of food
  left for the peasants to live on. Teams of cadres
  were sent out to the villages to search for any
  hidden caches of grain not turned in to the
  authorities. Tens of millions were left with
  nothing to eat.

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• When Mao or any of the other party leaders
  traveled around the countryside to see for
  themselves what the actual conditions were like,
  the local party officials would line the roads
  with temporarily replanted crops, to give the
  appearance of abundance. They would paint trees
  to hide the missing bark that had been torn off
  and eaten by the farmers. Selected peasant homes
  were filled with food and household objects for
  the visiting officials to see.

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• All the time, the peasants were in fact starving
  in the millions. In their dreadful state, the
  peasants sank to the lowest form of human
  survival they resorted to cannibalism. They dug
  up the bodies of the recently dead. They hid the
  fact that family members had died first, to
  continue to obtain an extra food ration from the
  party distributors and second, to hide the fact
  that the deceased had been eaten. Then, finally,
  at the lowest level of an instinct for survival,
  adults began to kill and eat their own children,
  usually trading their living child for that of a
  neighbor's, so they would not have to literally
  murder and eat their own son or daughter.
  Children would beg their parents not to let them
  be eaten.

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• And where was all the harvested grain seized by
  the provincial and local party officials? The
  vast majority of it was stuffed into government
  granaries. When some of the higher party
  officials received reports from relatives and
  friends around the country about the real state
  of the peasantry, Mao refused to be moved. He
  could not admit he had been wrong, both because
  it would undermine his own utopian fantasies and
  because it might shift power and influence away
  from himself to others in the party.

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• Finally, granaries were either opened or broken
  into. Peasant revolts occurred in various areas.
  Mao was forced to reverse course, but not
  publicly. All the shifts in policy were made to
  seem normal change and adjustment on the
  continuing road towards communism.