China under Mao: The Great Leap Forward¶
Core Argument¶
The Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) represented a catastrophic confirmation of the Stalinist core of the Chinese Communist Party, demonstrating how bureaucratic imperatives and forced industrialisation could override both human welfare and rational economic planning. Mao Zedong’s leadership differed from Stalin’s in important respects—he was an accepted revolutionary leader rather than a usurper, and the CCP came to power during a period of rising world revolution—yet the underlying dynamic was strikingly similar. Mao could permit genuine discussion within the Politburo but retained the capacity to overrule votes by packing enlarged Central Committee meetings with his supporters.
The path to disaster was prepared by the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957, which encouraged dissent to identify critics, leading to a crackdown that purged 50,000 leftists. The subsequent Anti-Rightist Campaign made loyalty to the Party, rather than professional competence, the decisive criterion for advancement, silencing experts who might have warned of impending catastrophe. When Mao launched the Great Leap in 1958, he ordered the amalgamation of co-operatives into giant communes averaging 5,000 households, organising 500 million peasants into these units within two months by decree. The 1958 harvest was good due to favourable weather, not the communes, which merely harvested crops planted by the earlier co-operatives.
The US trade embargo kept iron and steel in acute shortage. Rather than slow heavy industry, Mao ordered communes to build micro-scale blast furnaces, tasks for which cadres had no experience. By the end of 1958, up to 600,000 micro steelworks involved 90 million people, but most produced useless metal. Pots and pans were seized; quality was appalling. Millions of peasants were diverted from harvesting, while cadres seized produce for state quotas based on exaggerated reports. At the Lushan Conference in July 1959, Peng Dehuai’s criticisms were labelled “right opportunism”; he was replaced by Lin Piao, and a harsh new Anti-Rightist Campaign ensured cadres dared not report reality. Natural calamities hit in 1959–60, but grain procurement based on false figures caused famine that killed up to 20 million people—roughly the same proportion of the population as the 1932–33 Soviet famine.
The communes’ impact on women was contradictory. Communal dining halls and nurseries freed women for production, but these services were often inadequate, increasing women’s total labour burden. Women worked 12–14 hour shifts; pregnant women suffered miscarriages. The main aim was mobilising labour, not women’s liberation. By 1960, policy shifted to a conservative line: women were exhorted to return to domesticity, arranged marriages resurged. The communes were administered undemocratically; cadres were appointed state employees with no material interest in peasant concerns. The Great Leap Forward demonstrated that the bureaucracy was a hindrance, confirming Trotsky’s analysis that without political revolution a backslide to capitalism was possible.