The Great Leap Forward

As a result of the successful economic reconstruction that had taken place in the early 1950s under the First Five Year Plan, Mao Zedong implemented the Great Leap Forward in 1958 which was abruptly stopped in 1961. The aim was the rapid development of the agricultural and industrial sector simultaneously surpassing England and the Soviet Union in 15 years. The effort was a failure, bringing severe famine that resulted in millions of death.

Two major systems were introduced, i.e. the formation of the people’s communes and the backyard furnaces. Details on the Great Leap Forward can be viewed from the videos below.





The Great Leap Forward showed the close-mindedness of Mao Zedong as a result of his ideological perspective. Mao had a deep distrust of intellectuals and faith in the power of the mass mobilization of the peasants. With no knowledge in metallurgy or the supervision of intellectuals, he carried out the backyard furnaces program. He implemented, on a nationwide scale, unproven agricultural innovations. Intellectual who knew the fallacies of such methods or at least doubted them, did not speak up most likely due to the Hundred Flowers Campaign. The Great Sparrow Campaign destroted harvest instead as they were attacked by locusts swarm which flourished without a natural predator. The Great Leap Forward showed how Mao implemented reforms without careful thought and research on the credibility of the methods or opinions from a variety of experts and intellectuals. Millions of people died for the grand experiment of Mao Zedong.

The Great Leap Forward is also one of the many examples of Mao Zedong’s dictatorship and its catastrophic effect. Those who doubted the success of the Great Leap Forward were persecuted, thus closing the door to a detailed and non-biased assessment on the reforms. This also discouraged those who knew of the real situation and wanted to report it. We can’t be certain for sure of the reason of Mao’s insistence on the success of the Great Leap Forward before the damage was evident. Perhaps he simply did not wish to lose his credibility and power or he wanted to convince others and maybe himself that his ideology and methods was correct, perhaps he was scared of being proven wrong.

The Great Leap Forward-Impact and Consequences

The Great Leap Forward was a total failure, even referred as the Great Leap Backward and affected China for many years. The reform ruined China’s economy and resulted in the deaths of millions of people(exact figure is unknown).

During the Great Leap Forward, China’s economy initially grew but then plummeted. Its iron production increase by 45% in 1958 but the plummeted in 1961 and only reached the 1958 level in 1964.

1959 to 1962 was known as “Three Bitter Years”. According to China Statistical Yearbook the population was about 658,590,000 in 1961, about 13,480,000 less than the population of 1959. Birth rate decreased from 2.922% (1958) to 2.086% (1960) and death rate increased from 1.198% (1958) to 2.543% (1960), while the average numbers for 1962-1965 are about 4% and 1%, respectively. However, it was suspected that China understated the death toll and accurate figures were hard to determine.

The failure of the GLF allowed several party members such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to gain more popularity and power especially after their successful economic reforms. If Mao did launched the Cultural Revolution because he felt threatened by them, perhaps, it can be said that the GLF indirectly contributed to the implementation of the Cultural Revolution.

Nevertheless, a silver lining to this failure is perhaps that China learnt the hard way that intellectuals are needed and China need to rely more on education, acquire technical skills and implement capitalist economic system. Experience from the GLF may be one of the reasons of the openness of China’s current economy which is much more capitalist than communist.

Political scientist Meredith Jung-En Woo also argues: "Unquestionably the regime failed to respond in time to save the lives of millions of peasants, but when it did respond, it ultimately transformed the livelihoods of several hundred million peasants (modestly in the early 1960s, but permanently after Deng Xiaoping's reforms subsequent to 1978.)"



Author: Kristacia Kang