Why Mao’s Great Leap Forward Failed

There was a semi-viral clip a few months ago showing Hasan Piker receive a first edition of Chairman Mao Zedong’s little red book of quotations on a much publicized trip to China. To me, the most valuable thing about Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book is its ability to illustrate how socialist dictators say one thing and then do the opposite. Mao predicted that a government-controlled economy serving the common good would create untold abundance in China, stating that “The changeover from individual to socialist, collective ownership in private industry and commerce is bound to bring about a tremendous liberation of the productive forces. Thus, the social conditions are being created for a tremendous expansion of industrial and agricultural production” (p. 12).

The Communist Party of China tried to implement utopian socialist policies between 1958 and 1962, commonly referred to as the Great Leap Forward. Instead of working for the common good, these disastrous policies were responsible for creating a famine that resulted in the deaths of anywhere from 36 million Chinese people, according to Yang Jisheng, and 45 million according to Frank Dikotter. Yang (2008) notes that the famine was one of a kind, writing “It is a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics” (p. 14). Thankfully, in spite of the Communist Party’s efforts to conceal the causes and impact of the famine, Liu Shaoqi’s statement to Mao in 1962 that “History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized” has come true thanks to dedicated scholars (Yang, 2016, p. 15).

Many government interventions contributed to the famine. Dikotter (2010) says that one especially significant intervention was the government taking ownership of the means of production and forcing farmers into communes, writing that “In the pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivized, as villagers were herded together in giant communes which heralded the advent of communism…” (p. xi). Markets and prices dictated by supply and demand were replaced with government control over the nation’s resources. Farmers had to sell their produce to the state and the surplus grain was sold to pay off government debts to foreign nations. Farmers were forced to try and increase their crop yields by digging deep trenches to plant their grain and planting crops too close together. A large portion of the workforce was diverted from farming and instead directed to work on massive irrigation and infrastructure projects, many of which were abandoned or had to be demolished sometime later. Their labor was also diverted into smelting poor quality steel in backyard furnaces to speed up industrialization. Local officials exaggerated how much grain was being produced, which resulted in the government extracting larger amounts of surplus grain from starving peasants.

Party secretaries created a façade on Chairman Mao’s train route to lie about the campaign’s success. Mao’s personal physician Dr. Li Zhisui (1994) writes that “What we were seeing from our windows…was staged, a huge multi-act nationwide Chinese opera performed especially for Mao.” Officials purposefully built smelting furnaces near the train tracks and “…party secretary Wang Renzhong had ordered the peasants to remove rice plants from faraway fields and transplant them along Mao’s route, to give the impression of a wildly abundant crop.” (p. 278). Yang (2016) contends that the disastrous Great Leap Forward policies were able to continue as long as they did “because China had no freedom of the press and no opposition party” (p. 10). The people of China have achieved significant economic growth in recent decades, but not because of Chairman Mao’s socialist fantasies. Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012) conclude that who we should thank for China’s economic improvement today are “…Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedong’s death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions…” (p. 63). 

— Colin Braman

References

Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson (2012). Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. Currency.

Frank Dikotter (2010). Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. Bloomsbury.

Li Zhisui (1994). The Private Life of Chairman Mao. Random House.

Mao Zedong (1966). Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (2nd ed.). Unknown Publisher.

Yang Jisheng (2016). The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Picador.

Yang Jisheng (2012). Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [originally published in 2008].