Talk:Great Leap Forward

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
This article is part of WikiProject China, a project to improve all China-related articles. If you would like to help improve this and other China-related articles, please join the project. All interested editors are welcome.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
More information about this article...
Article Improvement Drive Great Leap Forward was the Article Improvement Drive for the week starting on March 12, 2006.

For more details, see the Article Improvement Drive history.
To-do list for Great Leap Forward: edit · history · watch · refresh

I'm not all that well surrounded or trained for historical research, but I would like someone else to clarify the opening passage under the heading of The Great Leap Forward - The Great Leap Forward;

The Great Leap Forward was the name given to the Second Five Year Plan which was scheduled to run from 1958-1960, though the name is now generally limited to the first three years of this period.

I have been led to think the Great Leap lasted closer to the five years originally suggested. Also, how can there be a first three years of this period, which is only two years long? I'm pretty sure, however long it took for the policy to disolve, that 1960 is an innapropriate date for the purposes of this passage at least.

Generally we don't include credits in Wikipedia


Contents

[edit] Credits

The original version of this text was derived from the article on the Great Leap Forward in the Encyclopedia of Marxism at www.marxists.org

  • Despite the risks to their carreers and their lives, some Communist Party members openly laid blame for the disaster at the feet of the Party leadership and took it as proof that China must rely more on education, acquiring technical expertise and applying borgeouis methods in developing the economy. It was principally to crush this opposition that Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in early 1966.

This paragraph fails to adequately characterize the general foot-dragging and lack of enthusiasum of the party structure which resulted from the failure of the main features of the Great Leap Forward. Open opposition resulted in disgrace which occurred to a few, but there was a more broadbased revulsion to any more nonsense from the center and Mao's pronouncements and initiatives where, if not met with open scepticism, were not implemented with much enthusiam. It was this general party-wide malais which resulted in his extraordinary effort to bypass the party with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Anyt comments? Fred Bauder 03:52 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I my opinion, the Great Leap Forward is absurd, mainly because of Mao's economy policy. So far as I know, a field that time could produce 10,000 kg rice! (even impossible today!) :) --YACHT 05:22, Dec 5, 2003 (UTC)
There is actually more than one viewpoint on the justification of the Great Leap Forward. Colipon 22:27, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Death toll?

How can the introduction to this article make no mention of the staggering number of deaths that resulted? The fact that it is impossible to determine exactly how many millions starved to death doesn't mean the issue should be ignored. Revisionism?


Didn't a lot of people die in the process? The article seems to ignore the terrible human toll of the project. My history textbook Mastering Modern World History, by Norman Lowe, suggests that some 20 million people died prematurely because of the Great Leap. Now, I don't know if that number is accurate, and some other sources suggest it might be much too high, but the death toll was nonetheless significant. For example http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TAB8.1.GIF (from http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MEGA.HTM) implies that 17 million people died due to democide during the relevent 9 year period, giving an annual death rate of some 2 million people. Assuming the Great Leap lasted 4 years, it would have cost around 8 million lives; probably more since the Great Leap years were probably more deadly than the average year during that 9 year period.

Be bold! If you think it's missing something, add it. --Jiang 02:07, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

In all of the Western and Eastern sources I've read on this topic, majority agree that between 1959-1962 about 20 million died of starvation and malnutrition. I personally believe anything above 25 million is propaganda. Afterall, China only had 500 million people in the late 50s.

Some actually estimated the toll at nearly 40 million. [[User:Colipon|Colipon+(T)]] 17:17, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Also keep in mind, however, that this was a less than open environment for outside (or inside, for that matter) investigative reporting. There was great incentive for the current -- and even to some extent subsequent -- regimes to allow only the rosiest possible reports to emerge. The fact that such unrosy descriptions and estimates were still forthcoming is quite telling.

I've deleted an paragraph on Jasper Becker - who I know a little - which describes him as a 'travel writer' and says he was in the country during the Great Leap Forward, neither of which is true. The article as a whole still needs expansion, especially on the power struggles within the Party; I'll try to do it sometime soon.

There's something you really need to understand before asking for exact figures on the death toll during this time period. Firstly how so many of the masses died in small towns and counties where records of their death couldnt possibly be made. Another is that canabolism was a huge factor during the GLF corpses were being dug up and meat taken from the bodies for the peasants to simply survive. A great historian to find out about the death tolls and Mao in general is Jung Chang. Her estimations of the death toll are as high as 38 million. A reason for her being much more reliable than some other historians is how she has better access to records and archives in China as she is Chinese and as a well known historian the government allows her to see archives that most historians or people never have or will. Simply becuase if they stop her or disallow her to certain places it would reflect very badly on China. Another reason that makes her figures more reliable than other historians is her husband Jon Halliday. A Russian historian who has extensive access to soviet archives which greatly helps Jung Chang create a death toll which seems much higher than most other historians. Read Jung Chang's new book on Mao for more info on the GLF and 100 Flowers campaign, really good especially if your studying China Revolutions for VCE or school.

--Chorgy 11:19, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

The claim for a death toll ignores how much Mao had raised Chinese life expectency from the norm in the Nationalist era. Chang and Halliday treat 1% death-rate as the norm, but it was not the norm under the Kuomintang. --172.201.10.215 18:26, 16 August 2005 (UTC)Gwydion M. Williams

The reason for wide differences in the deaths is not due to "incorrect data". The reason for the deaths was incorrect data, but the reason for the variance in the counts of said deaths is because of inadequate accounting of human life. I left it as "variations in data" so that it would not be inflammatory. Twocs 14:27, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Young people don't know about Great Leap Forward firsthand??

Well, obviously they wouldn't because they didn't live through it firsthand. Deng Xiaoping openly criticised Mao for the Great Leap Forward as well as the Cultural Revolution. History is not even a formal subject in China yet, although it is coming back up again and such incidents are portrayed in a very neutral tone. The reason we do not see much of this is because of older textbooks. Public discussion is allowed.

CharlesZ 01:06, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Actually, Deng never directly criticised Mao, but rather reversed some of his policies. "Openly criticised" is incorrect. Furthermore, you should be reminded that History is a formal subject in China, one of eight in middle school, along with Politics, the Sciences (bio;chem;physics), English, Mathamatics and Chinese. But that being said, the Great Leap Forward plays a very small part in any high school textbook, and is usually just an overview of policy. Please check on your sources. Colipon+(T) 23:25, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Took a long time to respond, I know, and I'm sorry for the confusion. I think I'm giving up this area of wikipedia for a while since its just too hard to keep up. Nonetheless, it is true that history is a subject, but most do not take history and political science seriously, according to most Chinese I know who grew up with the school system. Even so, I feel like I have no real authority on this subject as I based this on the accounts of friends and family...CharlesZ 03:41, 7 October 2005 (UTC)
Had Deng done what you said he would have more than likely died the same way as Liu Shaoqi, and infact he was in just as much peril as Liu during the Mao-led revolt against the communist party council. I agree with the above user regarding that point. RZ heretic 02:42, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Drought during the GLF, true or false?

During my research into the GLF, a well known Chinese historian Jung Chang claimed that there were no droughts during this time and was a fabrication created by the CCP. It was also been claimed by other historians that the weather patterns of this time and in China do not match the claims made by the 'official' statements made by the CCP. Therefore the question is raised that can a statement written on this article be claimed as factual? When it is disputed in a book with ten years of research behind it and writen by a prominent historian. --Chorgy 08:50, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Jung Chang is by no stretch of the imagination a 'prominent historian'. 'Wild Swans' is a fictionalized biography, and 'Mao: the unknown story' has come in for a lot of criticism from most major historians working in the field. To my knowledge she has not published any peer-reviewed works in any scholarly journals. --Cripipper 10:28, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Check the Encyclopaedia Britannica Yearbooks for 1958 to 1962. They do speak of abnormal weather, droughts followed by floods. This includes 30 inches of rain at Hong Kong in five days in June, part of a pattern that hit all of South China. There was also an occurrence of 'El Niño' for 1957-8, though no one knew it existed until the 1960s.

Don't trust Chang & Halliday; they repeatedly leave out facts that don't suit them. They deny bad weather, but never mention specifics. They complain about food exports but do not mention food imports, or that the USA hindered such imports with it's food embargo.

They are not prominent historians, and 10 years research mean nothing if the researchers have no judgement. Jon Halliday also wrote Korea: The Unknown War, from an anti-US viewpoint. He never mentioned that Kim Il-Sung was a Captain in the Soviet Army during World War Two: if he thinks it untrue, he should say why.

Jung Chang wrote a gripping family history in Wild Swans, but how reliable is it? Read it, and ask how plausible it is that her step-grandfather should have abandoned considerable wealth reduced himself to poverty to resolve a family quarrel. (It would look very nice in terms of 'Class Background', and she is actually the grand-daughter of a Chinese warlord.)

--172.201.10.215 18:49, 16 August 2005 (UTC)Gwydion M. Williams

[edit] Potemkin

W.E.B. DuBois (1959, author of an article "China") visited China during the Great Leap Forward and never supported famine-related criticisms of the Great Leap. Another author visiting China during the Great Leap named Anna Louise Strong wrote a book titled When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet based on her experience. However, critics point out that both these authors had been taken through Potemkin village style tours of China, never travelling outside of the supervision of the authorities. Strong's book is also heavily criticized for its very positive portrayal of Chinese rule in Tibet.

Removed the italicized text. No evidence if provided for this claim. Which critics say this? What proof do they have of their claims?

Scrib 14:40, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

NOTE: Do not, repeat do NOT rely on Jung Chang's new book on Mao as any kind of historical source. It's extremely sloppy, drawing conclusions without enough data, not providing any footnotes (so it's impossible to know what the sources are), and treating quotes from various people, including known liars like Mao, as if they're facts.

In terms of how many people died in the GLF, she does quote one method for making that calculation: looking at birth rates and census numbers. But there is a key flaw in that method, and that is that Chinese census numbers are notoriously inaccurate, and that is especially true of the 1950s.

The honest researcher will present the death toll as an estimate falling within a range, for example 15-38 million. The specific number won't be known until China opens up its archives, and even then it may never be known.

The important thing is, the number is huge. No matter how you estimate the death toll, it was horrendous. By any measure, the Great Leap Forward was a murderous catastrophe on a scale the world had never seen (and hasn't seen since).

I do not believe that Jung Chang is a proper historian in the first sense. While it is true that she has investigated into such matters, her writing is often biased in a certain 'one- dimensional' way, reducing many characters into all- around- good- guys or otherwise with no further analysis or allowance for complications within the character. This made her writing 'true', maybe, but only from some points one- dimensional of view and thus very much prone to controversy. In 'Mao: The Unknown Story' she pretty much completely reduced this complex character into a single 'Sauron'-like personality without a drop of goodness within his veins. Whilst I would not imagine for a second that Mao was a great people's hero, I would also argue that he was never Satan, so entirely following Jung Chang's writing in the same fashion as that of a neutral historian may not necessarily lead to proper conclusions or judgments. --User:Luthinya 16:25 25 January 2006

[edit] Jung Chang as a reliable author

As a strongly anti-maoist writer, using her statistics alone would be folly, her new book does not even disguise her anti-Mao sentiments, and delivers a blistering attack on the regime. For more precise figures you should use authors such as Immanuel Hsu and Li Cunxin if you believe that chinese authors are more reliable. Personally I would put the casualty rate at 30 million which appears to be the most consistant figure in all the books I have read. -Muller


[edit] Dr. Ping-ti Ho

I have deleted the following section:

Chinese expert of demography, Dr Ping-ti Ho, professor of history at the University of Chicago, in a book titled Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953, Harvard East Asian Studies No 4, 1959, mentions that:

My conclusion is that the claim that in the 1960s a number between 17 [million] and 29 million people was "missing" is worthless if there was never any certainty about the 600 millions of Chinese. Most probably these "missing people" did not starve in the calamity years 1960-61, but in fact have never existed. [4]

How can a book/pamphlet supposedly written in 1959 talk about the early 1960s in the past tense?

[edit] Far too short

I would like to nominate this article for Article Improvement Drive, as it is shorter than its talk page, and was a major event in world history. Any thoughts? -Estrellador* 18:01, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't like the idea of confusing quantity with quality. For instance, this which was in:

W.E.B. DuBois (1959, author of an article "China") visited China during the Great Leap Forward and never supported famine-related criticisms of the Great Leap. Another author visiting China during the Great Leap named Anna Louise Strong wrote a book titled When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet based on her experience. Strong's book is heavily criticized for its very positive portrayal of Chinese rule in Tibet.

This is trivial and extraneous and doesn't deserve space. Removing.

I completely agree. It's very short for such a major world event and also of a frankly low standard. I've read quite extensively on the subject and will attempt to improve the article shortly. Information on the Grreat Leap has been largely downplayed and surpressed in China and particualrly with China putting significant pressure on mainstream media companies to not offend party sensibilities, it is essentail that wikipedia has a better analysis of what went wrong.GregLondon 21:52, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Some additions

Mao retreated after the Great Leap Forward, but did not consider he had been mistaken in his broad strategy. He had also secured an 'ace in the hole' by replacing Peng Dehuai with Lin Biao, which gave him a decisive advantage when he advanced again during the Cultural Revolution. I added a mention of the replacement of Peng, since it seemed important. I didn't go into reasons, or what Liu's attitude was, since those matters are controversial and also outside of the topic.

As for deaths, the death-rate had been falling rapidly during the early years of Communist power, thanks to methods not very different from those used in the Great Leap. Over the whole period of Mao's rule, death rates fell rather more rapidly than in the Republic of India.

There was definitely some unusual weather, see Three Years of Natural Disasters. The backwash of an El Niño, as we can now recognise. The death-rate doubled, reverting to what it had been before Mao, though only briefly.

As for Jung Chang, she has a lot of sources, but makes a jackdaw collection of only those facts that suit her oppinions. Her 38 million deaths during the Three Years of Natural Disasters is based on blending figures from two different sources to get the maximum possible excess of deaths compaired to a normal year.

If you took the norm as the death-rate when Mao took over, or the average death-rate for a developing nation, then you'd conclude that tens of millions of lives were saved or extended because of Mao's overall approach, errors included.

Most people now assume that China was stagnant under Mao and only became prosperous when Deng took over. But you won't find a single economic expert who says this. China under Mao was one of the world's fastest-growing economies, exceeded only by Japan and the East Asian tigers, which had free access to the world market and US technology.

--GwydionM 17:12, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Most of this paragraph is a hopelessly blinkered view of world history written by a school boy who fancies himself as a Marxist sage. To describe the replacing of Peng as an "ace in the hole" is a travesty. Please actually study some economics before making ludicrous claims about Chinese economic growth prior to Deng's reversal of mao's policies. 82.44.17.16 19:27, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Some Additional Sources

These have rather more detail on what the GLF intended to do, party decisionmaking, and when and how things went wrong. It's time to move this article beyond a "dumb communist ideas wrecked China" narrative, especially since that makes the next two decades a bit incomprehensible. I've given author links so you know who they are. --Carwil 17:30, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pictures, photographs, illustrations

Would be nice, I think there may be some here, but I don't read Chinese and I don't know about Copyright during that era. It would be good if someone versed in Chinese (language, copyright) could take a look and if they are unhindered, upload them to commons, or contact me and I'll do it (I think some could do with some photo editing. Would be nice to have translations of the captions too. - FrancisTyers 16:33, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure. They said that some of these pictures are from other website.

[edit] "Disaster Center"

"Disaster Center" is not org or edu but only a individiual website.


Also, the number in the article - 30 million deaths resulting from the flood - does not match the 2 million cited as dead during that flood by this so called Disaster Center.

[edit] I'm confused

I hope more professional people work on it, at least can read Chinese. I'm doing some research on it and find it's very complex. So many rubbish information disturb my work and reliable resources are quite different.

population change

1958 659,940,000

1959 672,070,000

1960 662,070,000 -10,000,000

1961 658,590,000 -3,480,000

1962 672,950,000 +14,360,000

1963 691,720,000

http://www.cpirc.org.cn/tjsj/tjsj_cy_detail.asp?id=199

10,000,000+3,480,000=13,480,000 It should include a large number of normal death and "the death toll" ought to be much less than that. "the death toll somewhere between 25 and 60 million people" seems to be impossible.

--Gleader 22:23, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

  • No population census was carried out nationalwide between 1954 and 1963. Estimations of the population between this period are usually based on the 1953 census, plus various models. See here .--Skyfiler 01:34, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Backwash from an 'El Nino' event

This can now be recognised as the backwash of the El Nino event of 1957-58, the first to hit China since the 1920s. This was not realised at the time, the pattern was only discovered later.

“The increasing preoccupation with the weather, which began when vast areas in north and northeast China suffered a lack of snowfall and spring rain, grew steadily with the constant threat of floods throughout the southern provinces and a persistent plague of locusts in the region along the yellow river… The deluge in June (which brought 30 in. of rain to Hong Kong in five days) moved northward, flooding the countryside as it moved, so that the greater part of the country south of the Yangtze was seriously affected.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the year 1960).

The Yellow River also dried up, a very unusual event. The bad weather happened while Chinese agriculture was being massively re-organised—a process that in the longer term succeeded. But after several years of genuine success, local officials started lying when the weather turned against them. Mao let himself be misled.

Regarding deaths, it all depends what you define as 'normal'. You did not get visible deaths from famine; there were plenty of experienced observers who spoke Chinese and noted widespead hunger but not famine.

Official Chinese figures show the death-rate rising to 25.5 per thousand in 1961, having been brought down as low as 10 or 11 per thousand in the first years of Communist rule. This compares with a norm of 21 per thousand under Chiang Kai-shek, and a norm of 24.6 in the Republic of India for the same period. At the start of the 20th century, India had had a death-rate as high as 48 per thousand ([1]).

Chang & Halliday claim 38 million excess deaths, but on a very vague basis, comparing a norm of 10.8 per thousand to an alleged high of 43.4 per thousand. They seem to be taking their norm from the official figures but their high from alternative ‘reconstructed’ figures. The whole calculation lurks in a footnote to pages 456-457, with no indication of the complexities and no details of sources.

If one accepted their rather odd figures but took 20 per thousand as a normal death-rate for a poor country, then there were 7 million less deaths in 1957-62 than the Third-world norm.

An assessment of famine and disaster should anyway look at deaths per thousand, allowing a sensible comparison between big and small countries. The alleged 38 million deaths in a population of 650 million would be 59 per thousand, a middling sort of disaster. The Encarta reckons that the Irish Potato Famine killed 1 million out of 8 million, 125 per thousand, with as many again forced to emigrate. Among German military personnel, the Encarta’s figures indicate a shocking 163 per thousand for the Great War, but an even more shocking 180 per 1000 among the ethnic Germans called up for Hitler’s war. Genocide by mostly-Anglo settlers against inconvenient natives reduced them by several hundreds per thousand. Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe typically suffered death-rates as high as 800 or 900 per 1000. Some communities have no known survivors: this is true of both Jews in Europe and native peoples in areas of European settlement; I refuse to put the two human groups in separate categories.

--GwydionM 16:54, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] From the Library of Congress

All of this text is in the public domain. [2] I would encourage people to include it and remove when included. - FrancisTyers 20:04, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] History

China The Great Leap Forward, 1958-60

The antirightist drive was followed by a militant approach toward economic development. In 1958 the CCP launched the Great Leap Forward campaign under the new "General Line for Socialist Construction." The Great Leap Forward was aimed at accomplishing the economic and technical development of the country at a vastly faster pace and with greater results. The shift to the left that the new "General Line" represented was brought on by a combination of domestic and external factors. Although the party leaders appeared generally satisfied with the accomplishments of the First Five-Year Plan, they--Mao and his fellow radicals in particular-- believed that more could be achieved in the Second Five-Year Plan (1958-62) if the people could be ideologically aroused and if domestic resources could be utilized more efficiently for the simultaneous development of industry and agriculture. These assumptions led the party to an intensified mobilization of the peasantry and mass organizations, stepped-up ideological guidance and indoctrination of technical experts, and efforts to build a more responsive political system. The last of these undertakings was to be accomplished through a new xiafang (down to the countryside) movement, under which cadres inside and outside the party would be sent to factories, communes, mines, and public works projects for manual labor and firsthand familiarization with grassroots conditions. Although evidence is sketchy, Mao's decision to embark on the Great Leap Forward was based in part on his uncertainty about the Soviet policy of economic, financial, and technical assistance to China. That policy, in Mao's view, not only fell far short of his expectations and needs but also made him wary of the political and economic dependence in which China might find itself (see Sino-Soviet Relations , ch. 12).

The Great Leap Forward centered on a new socioeconomic and political system created in the countryside and in a few urban areas--the people's communes (see Glossary). By the fall of 1958, some 750,000 agricultural producers' cooperatives, now designated as production brigades, had been amalgamated into about 23,500 communes, each averaging 5,000 households, or 22,000 people. The individual commune was placed in control of all the means of production and was to operate as the sole accounting unit; it was subdivided into production brigades (generally coterminous with traditional villages) and production teams. Each commune was planned as a self-supporting community for agriculture, small-scale local industry (for example, the famous backyard pig-iron furnaces), schooling, marketing, administration, and local security (maintained by militia organizations). Organized along paramilitary and laborsaving lines, the commune had communal kitchens, mess halls, and nurseries. In a way, the people's communes constituted a fundamental attack on the institution of the family, especially in a few model areas where radical experiments in communal living-- large dormitories in place of the traditional nuclear family housing-- occurred. (These were quickly dropped.) The system also was based on the assumption that it would release additional manpower for such major projects as irrigation works and hydroelectric dams, which were seen as integral parts of the plan for the simultaneous development of industry and agriculture (see Agricultural Policies , ch. 6).

The Great Leap Forward was an economic failure. In early 1959, amid signs of rising popular restiveness, the CCP admitted that the favorable production report for 1958 had been exaggerated. Among the Great Leap Forward's economic consequences were a shortage of food (in which natural disasters also played a part); shortages of raw materials for industry; overproduction of poor-quality goods; deterioration of industrial plants through mismanagement; and exhaustion and demoralization of the peasantry and of the intellectuals, not to mention the party and government cadres at all levels. Throughout 1959 efforts to modify the administration of the communes got under way; these were intended partly to restore some material incentives to the production brigades and teams, partly to decentralize control, and partly to house families that had been reunited as household units.

Political consequences were not inconsiderable. In April 1959 Mao, who bore the chief responsibility for the Great Leap Forward fiasco, stepped down from his position as chairman of the People's Republic. The National People's Congress elected Liu Shaoqi as Mao's successor, though Mao remained chairman of the CCP. Moreover, Mao's Great Leap Forward policy came under open criticism at a party conference at Lushan, Jiangxi Province. The attack was led by Minister of National Defense Peng Dehuai, who had become troubled by the potentially adverse effect Mao's policies would have on the modernization of the armed forces. Peng argued that "putting politics in command" was no substitute for economic laws and realistic economic policy; unnamed party leaders were also admonished for trying to "jump into communism in one step." After the Lushan showdown, Peng Dehuai, who allegedly had been encouraged by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to oppose Mao, was deposed. Peng was replaced by Lin Biao, a radical and opportunist Maoist. The new defense minister initiated a systematic purge of Peng's supporters from the military.

Militancy on the domestic front was echoed in external policies (see Evolution of Foreign Policy , ch. 12). The "soft" foreign policy based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (see Glossary) to which China had subscribed in the mid-1950s gave way to a "hard" line in 1958. From August through October of that year, the Chinese resumed a massive artillery bombardment of the Nationalist-held offshore islands of Jinmen (Chin-men in Wade Giles but often referred to as Kinmen or Quemoy) and Mazu (Ma-tsu in Wade-Giles). This was accompanied by an aggressive propaganda assault on the United States and a declaration of intent to "liberate" Taiwan.

Chinese control over Xizang had been reasserted in 1950. The socialist revolution that took place thereafter increasingly became a process of sinicization for the Tibetans. Tension culminated in a revolt in 1958-59 and the flight to India by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans' spiritual and de facto temporal leader. Relations with India--where sympathy for the rebels was aroused--deteriorated as thousands of Tibetan refugees crossed the Indian border. There were several border incidents in 1959, and a brief Sino-Indian border war erupted in October 1962 as China laid claim to Aksai Chin, nearly 103,600 square kilometers of territory that India regarded as its own (see Physical Environment , ch. 2). The Soviet Union gave India its moral support in the dispute, thus contributing to the growing tension between Beijing and Moscow.

The Sino-Soviet dispute of the late 1950s was the most important development in Chinese foreign relations. The Soviet Union had been China's principal benefactor and ally, but relations between the two were cooling. The Soviet agreement in late 1957 to help China produce its own nuclear weapons and missiles was terminated by mid-1959 (see Defense Industry and the Economic Role of the People's Liberation Army , ch. 14). From that point until the mid-1960s, the Soviets recalled all of their technicians and advisers from China and reduced or canceled economic and technical aid to China. The discord was occasioned by several factors. The two countries differed in their interpretation of the nature of "peaceful coexistence." The Chinese took a more militant and unyielding position on the issue of anti-imperialist struggle, but the Soviets were unwilling, for example, to give their support on the Taiwan question. In addition, the two communist powers disagreed on doctrinal matters. The Chinese accused the Soviets of "revisionism"; the latter countered with charges of "dogmatism." Rivalry within the international communist movement also exacerbated Sino-Soviet relations. An additional complication was the history of suspicion each side had toward the other, especially the Chinese, who had lost a substantial part of territory to tsarist Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Whatever the causes of the dispute, the Soviet suspension of aid was a blow to the Chinese scheme for developing industrial and high-level (including nuclear) technology.

[edit] Economy

China The Great Leap Forward, 1958-60

Before the end of the First Five-Year Plan, the growing imbalance between industrial and agricultural growth, dissatisfaction with inefficiency, and lack of flexibility in the decision-making process convinced the nation's leaders-- particularly Mao Zedong--that the highly centralized, industry-biased Soviet model was not appropriate for China. In 1957 the government adopted measures to shift a great deal of the authority for economic decision making to the provincial-level, county, and local administrations. In 1958 the Second Five-Year Plan (1958-62), which was intended to continue the policies of the first plan, was abandoned. In its place the leadership adopted an approach that relied on spontaneous heroic efforts by the entire population to produce a dramatic "great leap" in production for all sectors of the economy at once (see The Great Leap Forward, 1958- 60 , ch. 1; Rural Society , ch. 3; The 1950s , ch. 6). Further reorganization of agriculture was regarded as the key to the endeavor to leap suddenly to a higher stage of productivity. A fundamental problem was the lack of sufficient capital to invest heavily in both industry and agriculture at the same time. To overcome this problem, the leadership decided to attempt to create capital in the agricultural sector by building vast irrigation and water control works employing huge teams of farmers whose labor was not being fully utilized. Surplus rural labor also was to be employed to support the industrial sector by setting up thousands of small-scale, low-technology, "backyard" industrial projects in farm units, which would produce machinery required for agricultural development and components for urban industries. Mobilization of surplus rural labor and further improvements in agricultural efficiency were to be accomplished by a "leap" to the final stage of agricultural collectivization--the formation of people's communes.

People's communes were created by combining some 20 or 30 advanced producers' cooperatives of 20,000 to 30,000 members on average, although membership varied from as few as 6,000 to over 40,000 in some cases. When first instituted, the communes were envisaged as combining in one body the functions of the lowest level of local government and the highest level of organization in agricultural production. Communes consisted of three organizational levels: the central commune administration; the production brigade (roughly equivalent to the advanced producers' cooperatives, or a traditional rural village), and the production team, which generally consisted of around thirty families. At the inception of the Great Leap Forward, the communes were intended to acquire all ownership rights over the productive assets of their subordinate units and to take over most of the planning and decision making for farm activities. Ideally, communes were to improve efficiency by moving farm families into dormitories, feeding them in communal mess halls, and moving whole teams of laborers from task to task. In practice, this ideal, extremely centralized form of commune was not instituted in most areas.

Ninety-eight percent of the farm population was organized into communes between April and September of 1958. Very soon it became evident that in most cases the communes were too unwieldy to carry out successfully all the managerial and administrative functions that were assigned to them. In 1959 and 1960, most production decisions reverted to the brigade and team levels, and eventually most governmental responsibilities were returned to county and township administrations. Nonetheless, the commune system was retained and continued to be the basic form of organization in the agricultural sector until the early 1980s.

During the Great Leap Forward, the industrial sector also was expected to discover and use slack labor and productive capacity to increase output beyond the levels previously considered feasible. Political zeal was to be the motive force, and to "put politics in command" enterprising party branches took over the direction of many factories. In addition, central planning was relegated to a minor role in favor of spontaneous, politically inspired production decisions from individual units.

The result of the Great Leap Forward was a severe economic crisis. In 1958 industrial output did in fact "leap" by 55 percent, and the agricultural sector gathered in a good harvest. In 1959, 1960, and 1961, however, adverse weather conditions, improperly constructed water control projects, and other misallocations of resources that had occurred during the overly centralized communization movement resulted in disastrous declines in agricultural output. In 1959 and 1960, the gross value of agricultural output fell by 14 percent and 13 percent, respectively, and in 1961 it dropped a further 2 percent to reach the lowest point since 1952. Widespread famine occurred, especially in rural areas, according to 1982 census figures, and the death rate climbed from 1.2 percent in 1958 to 1.5 percent in 1959, 2.5 percent in 1960, and then dropped back to 1.4 percent in 1961. From 1958 to 1961, over 14 million people apparently died of starvation, and the number of reported births was about 23 million fewer than under normal conditions. The government prevented an even worse disaster by canceling nearly all orders for foreign technical imports and using the country's foreign exchange reserves to import over 5 million tons of grain a year beginning in 1960. Mines and factories continued to expand output through 1960, partly by overworking personnel and machines but largely because many new plants constructed during the First Five-Year Plan went into full production in these years. Thereafter, however, the excessive strain on equipment and workers, the effects of the agricultural crisis, the lack of economic coordination, and, in the 1960s, the withdrawal of Soviet assistance caused industrial output to plummet by 38 percent in 1961 and by a further 16 percent in 1962.

[edit] Agriculture

Once collectivization was achieved and agricultural output per capita began to increase, the leadership embarked on the extremely ambitious programs of the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60 (see table 11, Appendix A). In agriculture this meant unrealistically high production goals and an even higher degree of collectivization than had already been achieved. The existing collectives were organized very rapidly into people's communes (see Glossary), much larger units with an average of 5,400 households and a total of 20,000 to 30,000 members on average. The production targets were not accompanied by a sufficient amount of capital and modern inputs such as fertilizer; rather, they were to be reached in large measure by heroic efforts on the part of the peasants.

Substantial effort was expended during the Great Leap Forward on large-scale but often poorly planned capital construction projects, such as irrigation works. Because of the intense pressure for results, the rapidity of the change, and the inexperience and resistance of many cadres and peasants, the Great Leap Forward soon ran into difficulties. The peasants became exhausted from the unremitting pressure to produce. The inflation of production statistics, on the theory that accuracy mattered less than political effect, resulted in extravagant claims. Disruption of agricultural activity and transportation produced food shortages. In addition, the weather in 1959-61 was unfavorable, and agricultural production declined sharply (see fig. 9). By the early 1960s, therefore, agriculture was severely depressed, and China was forced to import grain (during the 1950s it had been a net exporter) to supply urban areas. Otherwise, an excessive amount of grain would have been extracted from rural areas (see Economic Policies, 1949-80 , ch. 5).

[edit] Law

With the Anti-Rightist Campaign of mid-1957 and the Great Leap Forward (1958-60; see Glossary), a new mass line emerged. The Anti-Rightist Campaign halted the trend toward legal professionalism, which was seen as a threat to party control. The party leadership resolutely declared its power absolute in legal matters. The Great Leap Forward sought to rekindle revolutionary spirit among the people. The mass line, as it affected public order, advocated turning an increasing amount of control and judicial authority over to the masses. This meant greater involvement and authority for the neighborhood committees and grass-roots mass organizations.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign put an end to efforts that would have brought about some degree of judicial autonomy and safeguards for the accused, and the country moved toward police domination. By 1958 the police were empowered to impose sanctions as they saw fit. The party gave low priority to the courts, and, as many judicial functions were turned over to local administrative officials, few qualified people chose to stay with the still-operating courts. The number of public trials decreased, and by the early 1960s the court system had become mostly inactive. One unexpected by-product of the shift from formal legal organs to local administrative control was that criminal sentences became milder. Persons found guilty of grand theft, rape, or manslaughter were sentenced to only three to five years' imprisonment, and the death penalty rarely was imposed.

During the Great Leap Forward, the number of arrests, prosecutions, and convictions increased as the police dispensed justice "on the spot" for even minor offenses. Still, the excesses of the Great Leap Forward were milder than those of the 1949-52 period, when many of those arrested were summarily executed. Persons found guilty during the Great Leap Forward were regarded as educable. After 1960, during a brief period of ascendancy of the political moderates, there was some emphasis on rebuilding the judicial sector, but the Cultural Revolution nullified most of the progress that had been made under the 1954 state constitution.

[edit] In 1949, rural China had been stagnant for centuries

The Great Leap Forward happened after a series of similar policies had achieved great success. First removing a mass of parasitic landlords who lived off other people's work and gave nothing back: there was no such thing as an 'Improving Landlord' in Chinese culture. Then eradicating banditry and opium cultivation, long-term problems. Then considerable mechanisation and collectivisation.

Chiang Kaishek in 22 years of rule had done nothing for the rural Chinese, where condition had got worse. There was a small growth of modern industry, but Chiang was committed to preserving the parasitic landlord system and the warlord system, the actual basis of his power. No land reform was attempted till after 1949, when US money allowed them to buy off the landlords in Taiwan.

The death-rate during the so-called famine was no higher than the norm under Chiang Kaishek. There was bad weather, and Khrushchev chose that time to cut off aid. Visitors agreed that there was a lot of hunger but no actual famine. Most of the blame went to local officials who had gone on reporting successes when things turned bad.

By the end of Mao's rule, the economy had tripled and the population had doubled - impressive for a quarter century of rule in what had previously seemed a 'basket case'. There's lots of things that might have been done better - including encouraging birth control and not allowing the population to double. But any criticism should recognise the immense difficulty of achieving anything at all.

--GwydionM 14:24, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Although I support some of your views, GwydionM, please do not make all your arguments seem completely biased in favour of Mao. That is unreasonable. Colipon+(T) 05:04, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

What I'm trying to do, from a British viewpoint, is apply the same sort of assessment to recent Chinese history that British historians normally do for British history. Those who did a lot to make Britain stronger get praised and forgiven all sorts of misbehaviour. Even Oliver Cromwell has more supporters than critics.

There is also a current trend, in both the USA and Britain, to grant forgiveness for things that earlier generations accepted as errors - such as the Opium Wars and the Irish Potato Famine.

What I'm saying here is that Mao's overall success must be allowed for. In Anglo culture it is now generally believed that China stagnated under Mao and only progressed under Deng. Which is not what any economic expert says: they have to admit that the economy did grow quite fast under Mao. You can confirm this from a work called The World Economy: Historical Statistics, if you've not consulted it already. It also confirms the stagnation of the pre-Mao era. And also a population dip in the Three Bitter Years: I don't dispute that things went badly wrong there.

If you want to see my wider view, check here. Undoubtedly Mao was extremely ruthless, crushing dissenters who'd have been tolerated in a more secure society. But British society wasn't tolerant before it was secure. Check the period of the wars against Revolutionary France - radicals were crushed or scared into silence. Even the 'Chinese' method of expressing dissent by praising an out-of-favour leader happened then - check the case of Caroline of Brunswick.

--GwydionM 16:55, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

No social program is worth a cost of 30m souls deliberately done to death. Westerners who persist in excusing Mao are more concerned with preserving their fond memories of their own misplaced youthful idealism--not any love or concern for the endlessly mulcted Chinese masses. The article could be 100% anti-Mao, and it still wouldn't do justice to the horrors he visited upon China.

I said once already, "The death-rate during the so-called famine was no higher than the norm under Chiang Kaishek." --GwydionM 16:59, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Tripling of the economy in 25 years is actually not all that impressive, considering China's economy grew over 10 times in the same amount of time or less since Mao. Just about every country in the world grew comparatively rapidly from the early '50's until the mid '60's. In any event, while it would be fair to point out in an article about the economic history of China the tripling in 25 years, it is irrelevant to the GLF. Chinese govt. sources showed the economy shrinking in 1960. They quite readily admit the GLF was a failure and a mistake, and that's what we're discussing here. The GLF reversed whatever (admittedly considerable) gains were made between 1952 and 1958.

Re: "the norm under Chiang Kaishek," I don't know if the norm you refer to takes into account the fact that the Japanese were destroying half the country during some of the period and that the Chinese were destroying each other in civil war during the rest of the period. Using the Nationalist period as a comparison for death rate is not setting the bar very high. A better comparison would be the periods from 52-58 or 62-66. That is when the majority of the tripling in the economy took place and when there was no really large scale political violence.

Blaming local officials is somewhat apologistic. It's true they did misrepresent yields. But they did it in part because they were given ridiculous quotas by the central planners, and because the central leadership created an atmosphere where local officials where encouraged to appear as "red" as possible. Finally, under democratic centralism in a Leninist system, once a policy is in place, it is not to be questioned by party members and leadership. So it required evidence of massive failure to reverse the policy, and Mao stalled the first attempt at reversal at Lushan. Branny76 04:59, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inflated Death Toll

In "Famine in China, 1958-1961" by Basil Ashton, Kenneth Hill, Alan Piazza, and Robin Zeitz, the figures for registered deaths are as follows:

Fiscal year 1957-1958: 7.230 million

Fiscal year 1958-1959: 8.389 million

Fiscal year 1959-1960: 13.924 million

Fiscal year 1960-1961: 13.782 million

Fiscal year 1961-1962: 7.534 million

Excess deaths or deaths above normal from 1959-1961 therefore amounted to just 14.2 million compared to the flatulent 30 million estimation from the West.

The article in concern can be accessed [here]

Zvesda

Zvesda, good effort, but the link doesn't work. Also you don't give the normal death rate. --GwydionM 17:38, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Here's the link again:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010629212130re_/64.23.9.82/wh/famine/Research/Ashton84.pdf

Zvesda

[edit] Falsified weather?

I'm surprised at the recent change regarding bad weather. Beijing certainly gave out grain production statistics that were wildly wrong. But how could they falsify a report of five inches of rain in Hong Kong, then under British rule? Or fake the Yellow River drying up, reported by foreign residents. The reported pattern also matched the normal backwash of an El Nino event, though no one at the time knew about such things. --GwydionM 19:42, 5 May 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Not credible account of clamed impressive improvement in iron production

The article includes the entry:

During the Great Leap, the Chinese economy initially grew. Iron production increased 45% in 1958 and a combined 30% over the next two years..

The impression one gets by reading earlier entries in the article is that the only initiatives taken to promote metal production was to have farmers melt down productive home utensils into useless clumps of pig iron, using small, homemade furnaces.

So where did this remarkable increase in production come from?

--Philopedia 11:21, 15 June 2006 (UTC)


The Great Leap Forward was an important development in China and had many positive outcomes - the account given in this section is a serious misrepresentation of facts and opinions relying in large part on unsourced and unverfied statemnts. Is it really possible that not one person in China believed there was any benefit at all in the Great Leap Forward? This whole section needs re writing to eliminate unwarranted statements and introduce more facts into the description of the Great Leap Forward. This is difficult for individuals to do because of the authoritarian nature of the editing process of wikipedia which does not require verifiability for negative statements about the Great Leap Forward and removes statements of positive outcomes. This needs to be addressed urgently.

Having just re-read this section I think it worse than ever - who is writing this rubbish? Is it a hobby of western propagandists to put sheer nonsense in here? Wiki is dead! Comment added at 18:15:27 by I.P. 85.94.188.236

Well then, why don't you go ahead and tell us what positive things you would like added? Cripipper 09:02, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recent swing towards Maoism?

The contents and the tone of the article have been significantly changed between 26th of July and 2nd of August. See this comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Leap_Forward&diff=69539367&oldid=65880553

It appears that information that portrays chairman Mao in a negative light has been edited out and new information praising Mao has been added. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but this article needs to be protected from edits that swing it too much towards one viewpoint or the other.

In addition to that, sources are not properly quoted; for example, a webpage such as re-evaluationmao.org is not a proper source, even if it may contain proper sources.

[edit] Inflated Death Toll

The death toll of 20-40 million is flatulent. Data presented in the 1983 Statistical Yearbook of China shows the following death rates. They amount to about 12 to 13 million excess deaths. It should be taken into consideration that these were released while Deng conducted a staunch anti-Mao campaign. Deng had nothing to gain by minimizing these but had everything to gain by maximizing them.

Crude death rates in China:

1955: 12.3

1956: 11.4

1957: 10.8

1958: 12

1959: 14.6

1960: 25.4

1961: 14.2

1962: 10

1963: 10

Jacob Peters

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../g/r/e/Talk%7EGreat_Leap_Forward_db95.html"