The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine

Beyond the Soviet model

The First Five-Year Plan had succeeded, but Mao was dissatisfied with its model — priority to heavy industry, rule by experts, extraction of the rural surplus. “On the Ten Major Relationships” (1956) and the “contradictions” speech of 1957 stressed agriculture, light industry and local initiative. With the critics removed by the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in the winter of 1957 he saw the power of mass movement in the mobilisation of a hundred million peasants for irrigation works, and in Moscow in November declared that China would “overtake Britain in fifteen years”. Source 1 · Source 2

At the Nanning and Chengdu conferences of January–March 1958 Mao attacked Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun, who had argued in 1956 against “rash advance”, as men “fifty metres from the rightists”, and Zhou made a self-criticism. In May the second session of the Eighth Congress adopted the general line. The aim was “walking on two legs” — modern industry and native methods, centre and localities, town and country all at once — and planning became meaningless before political zeal. Source 1 · Source 3

Summer 1958: communes and steel

When cooperatives in Henan and Hebei merged into “communes” of thousands of households, Mao said on an inspection in August “people’s communes are good”, and the Beidaihe conference extended them nationwide; by the end of the year 99 per cent of households belonged to some 26,000 communes. The commune fused production, administration, militia and schooling; communal dining halls with “eat as much as you like” supply, the abolition of private plots and militarised labour organisation followed, and some areas declared they had “entered communism”. Source 4 · Source 1

Beidaihe doubled the 1958 steel target to 10.7 million tonnes. To meet it, ninety million people smelted iron in backyard furnaces that autumn, feeding in farm tools and cooking pots; most of the “steel” was useless pig iron. At the same time the competition of “sputnik fields” reporting ten thousand jin per mu turned statistics into fiction, and while labour was diverted to steel and irrigation a large part of a good harvest rotted in the fields. Source 5 · Source 1

The mechanism of famine

Actual grain output in 1958 was 200 million tonnes, but the official figure was 375 million, and the state raised procurement to match the inflated numbers. Although real output fell to 170 million tonnes in 1959 the procurement rate rose further and grain exports continued. Local cadres beat peasants in searches for “hidden grain”, and the dining halls’ stocks were exhausted before winter. The cities were protected by rationing; the countryside starved. Source 6 · Source 7)

In Xinyang prefecture, Henan, more than a million died in 1959–1960, and Anhui, Sichuan, Gansu and Guizhou suffered most. Estimates of the dead range with demographic method from fifteen million (China’s official estimate) to 36 million (Yang Jisheng) and 45 million (Dikötter), and the weight of natural disaster, the role of procurement and violence and the division of responsibility between Mao and local cadres are all disputed. What is certain is that China’s population fell in 1960. Source 6 · Source 8

Lushan: criticism becomes treason

The enlarged Politburo meeting at Lushan, Jiangxi, in July 1959 began as a “meeting of immortals” to cool the Leap. Peng Dehuai, the defence minister who had seen hunger in Hunan, wrote Mao a private letter on 14 July pointing to “petty-bourgeois fanaticism” and the error of “politics replacing economics”. Mao had the letter printed and circulated, and in his speech of 23 July branded it a rightist attack, threatening that if he were forced out he would “lead the peasants and overthrow the government”. Source 9 · Source 10

The Eighth Plenum branded Peng Dehuai, Huang Kecheng, Zhang Wentian and Zhou Xiaozhou an “anti-party clique”, and Lin Biao became defence minister. The nationwide “anti-right-deviation” drive that followed investigated millions of cadres who had called for adjustment, radical policy revived in the second half of 1959 and the famine reached its worst. Lushan was the turning point of the Leap and the point where trust between Mao and the veterans broke — which is why the 1965 attack on Hai Rui Dismissed from Office was read as an allegory of the affair. Source 9 · Source 11

Retreat: from the twelve articles to the Seven Thousand Cadres

In summer 1960, as the Soviet experts left and the horror of Xinyang was reported to the centre, policy began to change. The “twelve articles” of November restored private plots, rural markets and team ownership, and the “sixty articles on agriculture” of 1961 made the production team the basic accounting unit and shrank the commune. Grain was imported from Canada and Australia and twenty million urban residents were sent back to the countryside. Mao stepped back, declaring 1961 a “year of investigation and study”. Source 4 · Source 1

At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in Beijing in January–February 1962 Liu Shaoqi said the disaster was “three parts nature, seven parts man”, and Mao made an unusual self-criticism. But Mao’s self-criticism took the form “I take responsibility for the centre”, and Liu’s remark, Chen Yun’s forecast at the Xilou meeting in February of “seven or eight years” of recovery, and the household contracting spreading from Anhui looked to Mao like a “restoration of capitalism”. At the Tenth Plenum in September he declared the retreat over: “never forget class struggle”. Source 12 · Source 13

Memory and historiography

In China the famine was long called the “three years of natural disasters” or the “three difficult years”, and the 1981 Resolution on History classed the Leap as a “leftist error” without mentioning the dead. When census data were released in the 1980s Western demographers estimated the excess deaths, and in 2008 the Xinhua journalist Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, built from local archives and testimony, put the figure at 36 million; the book is banned on the mainland. Source 7) · Source 6

Interpretations diverge. Dikötter sees the famine as the product of state violence and stresses Mao’s responsibility; other scholars point to the structure of distorted information, competition among local cadres, and exports to repay Soviet debt. Amartya Sen noted that in a system without a free press or opposition the famine went unacknowledged. The Leap became a case study in the limits of “mass mobilisation” and the problem of information in planned economies, and the reform leadership’s acceptance of household contracting grew out of this experience. Source 8 · Source 14