5.01 Authoritarian States

1958 Great Leap Forward

Background

• also known as the Second Five-Year Plan
  • first one was relatively successful, from 1952 to 1957
• Mao hoped to emulate Five-Year Plans in Soviet Russia
• basically a giant experiment to reform China to catch up to the West through sheer political will – not very well thought through
• “I like fast” –Anna from Frozen, and probably Mao Zedong too
  • conservatives like Liu Shaoqi preferred a slower pace
  • decentralization of power allowed for speed, but was an interesting concession by Mao
• failure culminated in the 1959-1961 Great Famine

Reasons for Great Leap Forward

1. Political – Mao wanted another revolution, to control industry & agriculture and wrest control from middle-class ‘experts’
2. Social – Unemployment remained high, so Mao believed he could mobilize masses in a continuing revolution to boost growth
   • private family life prevented this, and so had to be abolished → in a way, resulted in communes
     • values like filial piety from Confucianism were seen as a hindrance to the state
3. Economic – Determination to turn China into a powerful industrial nation as quick as possible. Greater factory and agricultural production was required
   • harvests had to be bountiful → excess could be sold abroad for extra money and to earn foreign revenue

Key Features

Communes

• a new method of organizing peasant life
• abolished the private family sphere farms were traditionally held through (with exception of landlordism)
• collective and co-operative farms were joined into 24,000 communes with a population of 30,000 people each
• people in communes were organized into brigades of workers between 1000-2000, then teams of workers each consisting of 50-200 workers
• government tried to persuade people to join through propaganda
• 📈 1958: whole of China organized into communes with about 700 million people
• they seemed ideal to organize China’s massive peasant force:
  • large enough to tackle large projects like irrigation, and could run local schools and clinics
  • also set up local industries to mine coal and iron and make steel in blast furnaces
• life was lived communally – peasants ate in mess halls, and nurseries looked after children
  • took away the rights of parents, outsourcing it to the state – children were seen as a hindrance and distraction to the workers
  • resulted in separation anxiety from mothers, etc – adding onto rather than alleviating peasant stress
  • left children ripe for indoctrination, spending hours daily in the hands of the state

Party Propaganda

• posters, slogans, newspaper articles encouraged mass enthusiasm and long hours of work
  • comparable to 👤 Alexei Stakhanov
• loudspeakers played revolutionary music and stirring speeches, encouraging workers to exceed targets
• many projects finished on time as a result of the Party’s propaganda

Industry

• new industries were set up in cities to resolve unemployment – increasingly higher targets for production were set, similar to Stalin’s Five-Year Plans in Soviet Russia
• central, rational planning was abandoned in favor of local organization – enabled the speed Mao so desperately sought
  • small commune factories were set up to make all kinds of products like cement, ball-bearing and fertilizer
• great emphasis placed on steel production → 📈 establishment of 600,000 “backyard” steel furnaces in towns and villages
• every person of working age was ‘governized’ for the sake of the state – they peppered the countryside
• predictions and targets got eventually more and more unrealistic, with advisors not telling Mao the truth or criticize for fear of being labeled ‘rightists’
  • 1957 Autumn: Mao declared that China would produce 40 million tonnes of steel by 1970
  • 1958 Autumn: Mao predicted 700 million tonnes of steel by 1970

Results of the GLF

Summar

Lots of waste and inefficiency – no consolidation, everyone doing their own thing and fighting for raw materials to build.

Compare this to Stalin’s Magnitogorsk, a centralized, highly-efficient industrial complex with some semblance of quality.

Industry Results

• thousands of small factories were wasteful and inefficient
  • most steel produced out of ‘backyard furnaces’ were rubbish
• furnaces required so much of the country’s coal supply, trains couldn’t operate
• Party workers used people to work faster and produce more steel to meet targets and make Party officials look good → machines broke down and workers fell asleep at machines

Agriculture

• food production slumped because so many peasants were moved into industry
• 1961: China had to import grain and impose rationing
  • bad farming methods, floods and droughts caused bad harvests for thee years
  • even when there were good harvests, there wasn’t enough manpower to collect it all
• 📉 1960: harvest was reduced by 144 million tonnes because of GLF
• 📉 between 1959 and 1962, over 20 million Chinese starved to death

Communes

• most proved too large to be run efficiently, as they were hurriedly constructed by Party cadres keen to impress
• peasants resented the loss of private plots and attack on family life
• members couldn’t own private property, all received the same wages and families were broken up → no incentive to work hard → production fell
• loss of personal freedom, as well – everyone went to bed and woke up at the same time, with Party education classes between shifts of work → a very regimented life that was worse than their previous existence

Reasons for failure

Unsound economic policies

Note

These policies lasted from the beginning to the end of the GLF and were an underlying reason for its failure throughout its 4-year period.

• GLF policies were strongly influenced by the Lysenkoist method (which has been scientifically debunked) – namely, communes participating in “sparrowcide”
  • they competed to eradicate the ‘pests’ that were actually beneficial to the ecosystem → actual vermin multiplied to destroy stocks of grain
  • these methods were uniformly implemented across China, regardless of crop or soil or climate → peasants couldn’t intelligently adopt Lysenkoist policies to their own crop and land

On the Lysenkoist method

Do not state as a reason on its own; Its actual impact cannot be isolated and quantified. However, they are the initial change to farming methods responsible for the sudden plunge in agriculture.

• until 1957: 📈 steady agricultural growth
• 1959: 📉 famine caused death rate to increase from 1% to 1.5%

• disastrous agriculture + illogical industrial policies – Mao refused to believe that intensive human labor couldn’t compensate for lack of technology
  • (ideology) Maoism trusted the sheer will of the people over economic efficiency
  • industrial and construction workers were deliberately denied technology and made to perform tasks with most rudimentary tools

Poor direction in executing these policies

• little to no prior planning
• 1957 Anti-Rightist Purge eliminated many experts and technicians that could have advised on the process
  • it came back to bite the CCP, in short
• the backyard furnace scheme (see Industry) was so time consuming it distracted peasants from agriculture – arguably, the more pressing need
  • 1949-1957: 📈 disproportionate industrial growth compared to agricultural
• 1958 autumn: 90 million people abandoned farming – but there was NO significant increase in steel production
  • specifically, steel of high enough quality to be actually usable

Poor political leadership

• again, mainly Mao’s lack of planning – he rushed through everything
• dogmatic adherence to ideology
  • Mao rejected capital investment, technology and planning as revisionist and wrong
  • he was afraid of ‘losing’ the revolution to experts
• Party cadres rarely gave actual instructions; instead, they issued threats and demands to meet targets

flowchart TD

A(Mao creates a climate of fear) --> B(Cadres are unable to report true effects) --> C(Cadres greatly exaggerate production levels) --> D(top Party leadership remains oblivious) --> E(Spiral of delusion where they set higher targets) --> F(Cadres work peasants harder) --> G(Morale drops further) --> A

• even after Mao wised up to the extent of the disaster, he refused to acknoweldge it
• impact of poor planning & execution could have been mitigated with swift action to implement logical, revised policies based on feedback → poor Party leadership crucially prolonged the Great Leap Forward's initial failures

Unfavorable external circumstances

• 1959-1961: abnormally poor weather adversely affected harvests
  • 1960: northern China had a drought, southern China had serious flooding
  • 📈 affected 60% of arable land
  • this exacerbated poor harvests but is NOT the only factor; could not have precipitated such a disastrous, large-scale failure
• 1960 Sino-Soviet Split: Mao fell out with Khrushchev
  • 1960: Mao ordered all Soviet economic and scientific advisors back to the USSR → China had a shortage of educated technicians
    • Mao was unreceptive to modern economic planning and new ways of thinking
    • whether it was about control or hubris, this was ill-advised

Consequences to GLF

• famine caused by horrendous planning and bad harvests resulted in over 20 million deaths and widespread canninbalism
• Mao had to import food, which undermined his own aim of ‘self-reliance’ against the world China was supposed to achieve
• Mao took partial blame for the GLF’s failure
  • 1958, late: resigned as head of state BUT not head of party, recusing himself
    • retained political clout and influence
    • this resignation was more a formality – he lost face, but not power
    • the state kind of is the party – hence the big three had some clout but not nearly as much as Mao
• new leadership took over, and promptly tried to clean up Mao’s mess
  • President: 👤 Liu Shaoqi (Liu Shao-chi)
    • largely symbolic – power rested with the Prime Minister
    • was persecuted
  • Prime Minister: 👤 Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai)
    • later got liver cancer requiring overseas treatment, which Mao refused permission for
      • he worried that going overseas to receive medical treatment signaled China’s inferiority
  • CCP General Secretary: 👤 Deng Xiaoping
  • they abandoned the GLF
    • closing down backyard factories, returning workers to farming
    • gave private land back to farmers
    • reduced communes to one-third of the original size
• potentially a factor for the Cultural Revolution, spooking Mao since the counter-policies by the new big three and policies suggested by Soviet planners worked

Essay Question

• Examine the reasons for the failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962).