Great Leap Forward Flashcards
GLF - aims
- Aimed at making China a “first-class modern power” (Mao).
- Surpass Britain in five years.
- “Impossible demands were supposed to become reality”(Chang).
- a communist society could emerge before its economic structures were fully realised
- wanted to clear Russian debts
- farm production for the year would rise by 1 7 - 2 0 per cent.
GLF - beginnings
5-23 May 1958 – Great Leap Forward officially launched
- • revised production targets of Second Five-Year Plan upwards & collective organisation of the countryside encouraged
GLF - People’s Communes
- • 17-30 August 1958 – Mao called for an enlarged meeting of the Politburo to establish People’s Communes
- • by the end of 1958 – 740,000 Agricultural Cooperatives were reorganised into 26,000 People’s Communes – averaged 5,000 households with total populations of up to 100,000 people
- Based on his fieldwork, Ralph A. Thaxton Jr. describes the people’s communes as a form of “apartheid system” for Chinese farm households.
- Frank Dikötter writes that beatings with sticks was the most common method used by local cadres and roughly half of all cadres regularly pummeled or caned people.
- In a Guangdong commune,the six-month rice supply went in twenty days
GLF - Backyard steel production
- . ‘The more metal you collected, the more revolutionary you were,’ a
- produced 3,000,000 tons of unusable steel as compared to only 8,000,000 usable
- removed people from the fields
- By the end of 1 9 5 8 , 1 0 0 million people laboured at the furnaces and associated enterprises
- 5 billion yuan spent
GLF - state-owned enterprises
- bring all industry under total government direction – existing firms could no longer operate as private, profit-making companies
- basically inefficient, no motivation to show initiative, surplus went to the state
GLF - Lysenkoism
• close planting & deep ploughing - led to poor quality and lower yields, ignoring time-honoured wisdom of China’s peasant farmers
GLF - grain collection by the state
• 90% of harvest collected by the state
Fenby on GLF
To begin with, the Leap was not without sense, but, as political considerations took command, it became more of a vision than a rational economic programme,
GLF - impact on on industry
- China’s total iron output would reach only 7 milliontonnes that year; just 40 per cent of that would be good quality 1958
GLF - famine
- Despite the harmful agricultural innovations, the weather in 1958 was very favorable and the harvest promised to be good. Unfortunately, the amount of labour diverted to steel production and construction projects meant that much of the harvest was left to rot uncollected in some areas.
- Foreign aid was refused
- 36 million dead acc Yang
- Those labeled as “black elements” (religious leaders, rightists, rich peasants, etc.) in any previous campaign were given the lowest priority in the allocation of food, and therefore died in the greatest numbers.[
- According to genocide scholar Adam Jones, “no group suffered more than the Tibetans”, with perhaps one in five dying from 1959 to 1962.
GLF - cauded of famine
22 million tons of grain was held in public granaries at the height of the famine, reports of the starvation went up the bureaucracy only to be ignored by top officials, and the authorities ordered that statistics be destroyed in regions where population decline became evident
- “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.” Mao
GLF - deaths due to violence
Frank Dikötter estimates that at least 2.5 million people were beaten or tortured to death and 1 to 3 million committed suicide
GLF - reinnig in
- the Wuhan Plenum:
- 10 December 1958 – rein in more radical aspects; production quotas reduced & Communes brought under greater degree of centralised accountability
- decided to harvest 370 million tonnes instead of 450 million tonnes (actual harvest 170 million tonnes)
GLF - effect on leadership
• April 1959 – Mao stayed at Party Chairman while Liu Shaoqi was appointed President; endorsed more pragmatic measures and moderated the Great Leap Forward
Lushan conference
• 23 July 1959 – Mao took ‘primary responsibility’ for the failures, while also blaming other delegates
- I do not claim to have invented People’s Communes, only to have proposed them
- Mao threatened that he would raise another Red Army against the government if not supported as leader
- 16 August 1959 – Central Committee condemned Peng as an ‘anti-Party element’ and r**eaffirmed the General Line of the Great Leap Forward (270 million to be collected, harvest 170 million) **; Peng replaced as defence minister by the loyal Maoist Lin Baio
- new Anti-Rightist campaign carried out to silence and punish any other ‘little Peng Dehuais’ in the Party and government 3.5. million cadres affected
-“After Lushan, the whole Party shut up. We were afraid to speak out. It stifled democracy… This led straight to the terrible times of the Cultural Revolution” Wang Bingnan, Communist official
