Mao's Great Leap:

More successful than we thought

[In this first of a two-part series, we sketch the pressures leading to the Great Leap Forward and its early successes. In Part Two we will examine its failures and Mao’s subsequent disgrace].

After the revolution China’s landlords, the world’s oldest hereditary caste, retained enough land to live on, but their class vanished from the pages of history. This, warned Mao, created new inequalities, “As is clear to everyone, the spontaneous forces of capitalism have been growing in the countryside in recent years, with newly rich peasants springing up everywhere and many well-to-do middle peasants striving to become rich. On the other hand, many poor peasants are still living in poverty for lack of the means of production, some are falling into debt, and others are selling or renting out their land. If this tendency goes unchecked, polarization in the countryside will inevitably worsen”.

Some colleagues opposed collectivization as premature, dangerous, and utopian until China developed a strong industrial base and introduced mechanization. Socialism belonged in the distant future, after the countryside went through a capitalist transformation. Others, wishing only to stabilize the existing economy, rejected both capitalism and socialism, but Mao argued for basing agricultural collectivization on mechanization, not the other way around. No one family could afford–or economically use–a tractor, but a collective could do both, he said. Collectively, peasants could better resist natural disasters, manage their labor, adapt to new technologies and crop varieties, and purchase industrial products. When opponents pointed to peasants’ inexperience, Mao argued that they could only gain experience by doing things themselves. He said China should do a better job of collectivization because it could learn from the USSR’s mistakes.

By 1958, communications were still primitive, the government was still inexperienced, goal-setting was amateurish, and Beijing’s capacity to coordinate national programs was crude, yet Mao was under relentless pressure. He had doubled food production and halved the death rate, but the birthrate had doubled and he was racing to modernize the country while under foreign embargoes and threats of a nuclear attack. Though he had re-centralized state power, reunified the country, fashioned a modern nation-state, created a national market, and abolished landlord-tenant relations, he considered the changes cosmetic, “Dividing up the land and giving it to the peasants transforms the property of the feudal landlords into the individual property of the peasants–but this remains within the limits of a bourgeois revolution. To divide up the land is nothing remarkable. MacArthur did it in Japan. Napoleon divided up the land, too. Land reform can neither abolish capitalism nor lead to socialism”. As a matter of survival, he insisted, China must develop agriculture and industry simultaneously,

If, after working at it for fifty or sixty years, you are still unable to overtake the United States, what a sorry figure you will cut! You should be read off the face of the earth. To overtake the United States is not only possible but necessary and obligatory. Otherwise, the Chinese nation will disappoint the world and not contribute to humanity… In building the country, we–unlike materialists who stress mechanization and modernization–must pay chief attention to revolutionizing the human spirit… In man, motivation derives from consciousness, which, in turn, comes from socialization. Motivation is the source of moral energies like dedication, devotion, determination, faith, frugality, diligence, and simplicity. Consciousness and inspiration reinforce each other and can be transformed, one into the other.

China could not afford to walk, he said, just to survive it must take a giant leap. He discussed the challenges of managing through corrupt local officials and wrote directly to local production teams and even local work squads, warning against inflated claims:

I want to address a problem with our agriculture. Please ignore top-down crop targets and stick to what is feasible. Thirty percent, even sixty percent higher yield than last year would be excellent, but what’s the point of boasting about four hundred percent when that’s merely impossible? As for dense planting, let old, middle-aged, and younger farmers discuss it and decide it within your production teams. Save your food! Preserve it well, build a reserve for future emergencies. We can’t afford boasting or empty talk for at least ten years. Make high yields in small fields your immediate goal because mechanization will take at least ten years, so we must simply farm more acreage for the next three years. Plant on a larger scale. Set up research institutes for farming tools. Fertilizer is essential. Many lies are caused by pressure from superiors who boast and pressure those below them, and they’re difficult to deal with. Speak the truth. Promise only the number you can deliver. Don’t pretend you can ‘do it with effort’ when you actually can’t. Just report how much the harvest really is. If the reality is not as low as I predict–if a real, high outcome makes me look like an out-of-touch conservative–I’ll thank heaven and earth. – Mao Zedong, Chairman.

Innovative and enormously ambitious, his Great Leap would teach peasants industrial production while simultaneously overcoming famine and threats of foreign aggression. Communalized peasants and workers would share responsibilities. Communal childcare and communal kitchens would free women to join the workforce and, by distributing development throughout the countryside, they would make centralized, expensive, nationwide transportation infrastructure unnecessary. Peasants ‘walking on two legs’ would both farm and develop light industry while erecting dikes, building dams, and expanding irrigation. Increased agricultural productivity would free up labor for local manufacturing, and, in the absence of foreign capital, labor-intensive rural industries would meet local needs. Locally produced cement would build local dams that would water soil enriched with locally made fertilizer through locally made irrigation equipment.

Coal, steel, textile, and electricity generation rose thirty percent, infrastructure rose forty percent in those three years, and peasants built thousands of dams, including nine of today’s ten largest. One of them, the gigantic Xinfengjiang Reservoir, holds ten cubic meters of clean water for everyone in China and has generated billions of kilowatts of electricity, powered rural and urban development, played a vital role in flood control and irrigation, and waters thirsty Guangdong and Hong Kong. Says economic historian Maurice Meisner1,

The higher yields obtained on individual family farms during later years would not have been possible without the vast irrigation and flood-control projects–dams, irrigation works, and river dikes–constructed by collectivized peasants in the 1950s and 1960s. By some key social and demographic indicators, China compared favorably even with middle-income countries whose per capita GDP was five times greater”. Indeed, of all the industrial projects China would launch in the next fifteen years, two-thirds were founded during the Great Leap.

But a looming natural catastrophe would overshadow its achievements.