Today in History, May 23rd, 1957 — Chairman Mao announces the beginning of The Great Leap Forw

Today in History, May 23rd, 1957 — Chairman Mao announces the beginning of The Great Leap Forward.The Great Leap Forward was Chinese communist leader Mao Tse Tung’s pet project to rapidly industrialize and and collectivize China.  In essence, the Great Leap Forward was Mao’s plan to turn China into the communist utopia he fought for most of his life.  The project began with collectivization of the populace.  In a matter of months, 700 million people would divided up between almost 27,000 communes across the nation.  Each commune was assigned a party leader who oversaw the commune’s work and ensured planned quotas were met.  Private property was eliminated as was all forms of commerce.  The idea behind this was to eliminate class differences and make all citizens as equal as possible.  A part of the collectivization of the populace was the institution of a new agricultural revolution.  It was hoped that with collective efforts, the people could produce an overabundance of grain, which would help fuel a new industrial economy.The second and most important goal of the Great Leap Foward was to rapidly industrialize the nation.  One of Mao’s obsessions was in the production of steel.  In fact it was his goal that in 15 years China would produce more steel than the United Kingdom and the United States. New steel factories and foundries were built all over China.  The obsession with steel production went so far that peasants were made to produce steel in special backyard furnaces.  For the most part these people, who grew up in a life of simple agriculture, had little to no education in metallurgy. As a result, most of the steel produced was of poor quality.The life of a Chinese person living in a commune during The Great Leap Forward was pretty bleak.  Most time was spent working on the collective farm.  When not working on the farm they were typically making steel.  There was little to no free time, and eventually people were worked harder and harder as production quotas increased.  Many thousands of Chinese laborers were worked to death trying to meet impossible quotas.  Party leaders whose commune’s could not meet quotas, or who protested the tyranny of the quota system were executed.The emphasis on steel production and industrialization had a terrible side effect.  After a few years of the Great Leap Forward steel production had hit record levels in China.  Unfortunately people cannot eat steel.  The mass numbers of workers employed in the steel industry caused there to be a deficit in the labor needed to grow food.  Worse yet, the new agricultural commune system was beginning to fail.  Harvest after harvest overworked and exhausted peasants produced less and less.  Part of Mao’s new agricultural plan depended on new farming machinery produced from China’s new steel industry.  However the poor quality steel that was produced caused machinery to break down easily and often.  By 1959 the several regions of China began to face a terrible famine.  Millions began to starve.  In response the Chinese government did the unthinkable by increasing grain exports to enhance its international prestige.  This combined with drought and poor weather culminated in one of the worst famines in human history.  Between 1959 and 1961 between 20 million and 40 million people died of starvation.  Growing your own food was illegal, so people were often forced to eat tree bark, insects, weeds, and other marginal food sources.  In some instances the most desperate were forced to resort to cannibalism.  Another 2-3 million were executed for criticizing the program, even though it was clearly a failure.Due to the failures of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Tse Tung was removed as head of the Communist Party and sidelined in the government.  He would later regain his position by creating a social-political movement called the “Cultural Revolution”, a propaganda movement designed to instill hard line communism into the country’s youth, and more importantly eliminate his enemies and critics.  The Cultural Revolution would lead to another two decades of death, torture, and tyranny under Chairman Mao. -- source link

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