Thursday, 27 April 2017

Great Leap Forward:

  • The Great Leap Forward of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social campaign by the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1958 to 1961. The campaign was led by Mao Zedong and aimed to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a socialist society through rapid industrialization and collectivization. The campaign caused the Great Chinese Famine.
  • Chief changes in the lives of rural Chinese included the introduction of a mandatory process of agricultural collectivization, which was introduced incrementally. Private farming was prohibited, and those engaged in it were labeled as counter-revolutionaries and persecuted. Restrictions on rural people were enforced through public struggle sessions, and social pressure, although people also experienced forced labor. Rural industrialization, officially a priority of the campaign, saw “its development … aborted by the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward.
  • On the communes, a number of radical and controversial agricultural innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao.The policies included close cropping, whereby seeds were sown far more densely than normal on the incorrect assumption that seeds of the same class would not compete with each other
  • Substantial effort was expended during the Great Leap Forward on large-scale, but often poorly planned capital construction projects, such as irrigation works often built without input from trained engineers.
  • Mao saw grain and steel production as the key pillars of economic development. He forecast that within 15 years of the start of the Great Leap, China’s steel production would surpass that of the UK. In the August 1958 Politburo meetings, it was decided that steel production would be set to double within the year, most of the increase coming through backyard steel furnaces.During this rapid expansion, coordination suffered and material shortages were frequent, resulting in “a huge rise in the wage bill, largely for construction workers, but no corresponding increase in manufactured goods.”Facing a massive deficit, the government cut industrial investment from 38.9 to 7.1 billion yuan from 1960 to 1962 (an 82% decrease; the 1957 level was 14.4 billion)
Backyard furnaces:
  • With no personal knowledge of metallurgy, Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood.Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal.
To fuel the furnaces the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants’ houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the “scrap” for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools and even hospitals.
Although the output consisted of low quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth, Mao had a deep distrust of intellectuals and faith in the power of the mass mobilization of the peasants.
Mao visited traditional steel works in Manchuria in January 1959 where he found out that high quality steel could only be produced in large-scale factories using reliable fuel such as coal. However, he decided not to order a halt to the backyard steel furnaces so as not to dampen the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses. The program was only quietly abandoned much later in that year.
Failure of Great Leap Forward:

  • The amount of labour diverted to steel production and construction projects meant that much of the harvest was left to rot uncollected in some areas. Although actual harvests were reduced, local officials, under tremendous pressure from central authorities to report record harvests in response to the innovations, competed with each other to announce increasingly exaggerated results. These were used as a basis for determining the amount of grain to be taken by the State to supply the towns and cities, and to export. This left barely enough for the peasants, and in some areas, famine and starvation set in.
  • The exact number of famine deaths is difficult to determine, and estimates range from 18 to upwards of 42 million people. Also at least 2.5 million people were beaten or tortured to death and 1 to 3 million committed suicide.
  • The years of the Great Leap Forward in fact saw economic regression, with 1958 through 1962 being the only period between 1953 and 1985 in which China’s economy shrank. Enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all.The Great Leap was a very expensive disaster.
  • In subsequent conferences in March 1960 and May 1962, the negative effects of the Great Leap Forward were studied by the CPC, and Mao was criticized in the party conferences. Moderate Party members like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping rose to power, and Mao was marginalized within the party, leading him to initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

No comments:

Post a Comment