Continuous Revolution China In The 20th Century

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

During the 1950’s Mao Zedong launched the ‘First five year plan’ in an effort to shift the country towards becoming a world power, and become less dependent on agriculture. China received aid from the Soviet Union, and successfully built new industrial plants. China was making enough capital from industry alone, that they were no longer dependent on the Soviet Union. The success of the ‘First five year plan’ lead Mao to the ‘Second five year plan’ or ‘The Great Leap Forward’, in order to further aid the economic growth of China. From my Study of Chinese history I found ‘The Great Leap’ to be an interesting topic as it was introduced in order to aid the Chinese economy, however this was not the case.

The great leap forward was a campaign launched by the Chinese communist party to speed up economic development, and transform China into a country that could rival such Economies as The United Kingdom and The United States of America.

The Communist party changed the State of China by industrialising the country. Peasants were to provide food, crops and steel for the urban economy. [1] 

But was this the right path to modernising China? Or did it do more damage than good?

The idea of the Great Leap Forward was to skip several stages of economic development a country would normally go through by encouraging the masses to work extremely hard for a short period of several years.

"Surpassing Britain and catching up with the United States" became the slogan, and a means of motivation for the Great Leap Forward. [2] 

The Great Leap heavily depended on the mobilisation of peasants. Thus, the People’s Commune was born. People’s communes were several smaller farm collectives combined, and were made up of several smaller farm collectives combined. They usually consisted of around 4,000 – 5,000 families, but often were made up of over 20,000 [3] .

The aim of the communes was to pool the resources of many farms in order to allow the peasants to provide for themselves, and for the urban economy. In 1958 the peoples’ commune was made official state policy.

Technical constraints, and the experts that warned about them were both disregarded during The Great Leap. The Spirit of the Leap was summarised well in one of its main slogans: "Strive to go all out to achieve more, faster, better and more economical results." However, It seems as though the focus was placed more on the "faster" and less on the "better, and more economical results".

In the communes everything was done as a large unit. There were community mess halls, tailoring teams, kindergartens, nurseries, public baths barbershops, agricultural middle schools, and even retirement homes called ‘happiness homes’. [4] 

Although, in theory this system sounds like it may work, the conditions in the communes were often very poor. The Chinese government used propaganda to promote the people’s commune, and made posters depicting the perfect commune.

Initially the Chinese government believed that collectivisation was extremely effective, as grain output was reported to be very high. However, Individual communes were reporting false grain yields [5] , which in turn caused neighbouring communes to report higher figures in an effort to out do each other.

Seeing as such large quantities of grain were apparently being produced, The Communist Party took larger percentages from the peasants. This lead to widespread famine as they were losing more grain than they had to spare. [6] 

Mao became somewhat obsessed with steel production in late 1958 even though he admitted that he had little knowledge of industry. [7] 

In the communes, people spent months on end working on arduous and repetitive tasks. The country experienced an agricultural labour shortage because much effort and manpower was put in to new manufacturing efforts like the backyard steel furnaces.

Many aspects of peasant life changed. People even contributed their cooking utensils [8] , and any other sources of scrap metal to be smelted in order to produce more steel. Despite the mass mobilisation and extreme efforts of the peasants, the fruit of their labour was low quality lumps of pig iron that had little worth. This is hardly what Mao Zedong wanted to achieve, and does not display much economic growth for China. When the poor quality steel was acknowledged the backyard furnaces were not stopped, Mao did not want to discourage the peasants.

In 1957 steel production had been 5.35 million tons. At the National People’s Congress, the 1958 target was set at 6.2 million tons, a reasonable figure. But later that year Mao decided that 10.7 million tons, a 100 per cent increase over the previous year, could be achieved. [9] 

The following year, Mao explained that he had not taken into account that the steel campaign would require massive movements of iron and coal to areas without them and the overload that this process would put on China’s rail network. [10] Mao placed the blame on the State Planning Commission for failing to fulfill its responsibilities and for being unable to cope with this problem.

In industry, technicians were pushed aside. Untrained workers would run machinery for long periods of time with no maintenance. This was part of the effort to achieve production goals in a very limited amount of time.

Large numbers of new students were admitted to schools by organising part work, part study programs at the expense of quality of course. [11] I have found that this became a theme of The Great Leap. Quality was abandoned for quantity, and speed.

In 1959, The Lushan Conference was held at the Lushan resort on Mount Lu in Jiangxi Province as a means to discuss the Great Leap Forward. On the night of July 13, Peng Dehuai, China’s Defence Minister visited Mao’s quarters, but found that he was asleep. So instead he wrote a ‘letter of opinion’ to Mao Zedong criticising certain aspects of The Great Leap. One of the main elements of The Great Leap that Peng brought to attention was the mass exaggeration, and the over exaggeration of likely grain production that took place. Both of which, led to the conclusion that the food problem had been solved. [12] 

As one could imagine, Mao did not look too kindly upon this display of constructive criticism. He had the letter distributed at the conference. Peng Dehuai stated that the letter had not been meant for publication and that he was shocked when it was distributed with the title ‘Comrade Peng Dehuai’s letter of opinion’. [13]