Great Leap Forward (1958-59)

Domestic Matters

- There were concerns throughout the CCP as to the imbalances in growth in the First Five Year

Plan. While industrial growth had advanced at the pace of 18.7% a year, agricultural growth had

only increased by 3.8% per year. Population increases cut the average increase in grain

consumption to 3%.

- The countryside was simply not capable of producing the sort of surpluses required by the

Stalinist model of industrialization.

- Two proposed Solutions: The central planners - such as Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun favored the

offering of increased material incentives to the peasantry along with an increased access to

consumer goods. They also wanted to improve the access of the peasants to fertilizer and

agricultural machinery. If the production of these goods, slowed overall industrial growth so be

it, China would still be able to achieve steady gains.

- Mao, supported by Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, favored a more dramatic approach. He

believed that an increase in moral incentives and campaigns of mass mobilization would be

sufficient to inspire the masses to reach new heights. China’s woes would be solved by a

spontaneous enlivening of the whole nation.

- Overriding faith in human will based on the experiences of the CCP during the Long March and

the succeeding wars.

- Also favored a decentralization of decision making, decline in the influence of the economic

planners and an increase in the influence of local cadres. Believed that the planners were overly

cautious and that once the human will of the masses was unshackeled, the peasantry would prove

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to be capable of enormous change.

- Proper motivation, humans can achieve anything.

- Naturally Mao’s point carried the day, the Great Leap Forward Policy was announced in 1958,

it would enable China to make the Great Leap to pure communism.

- Mass Mobilizations

Ex. Irrigation - 100 million peasants had allegedly opened up 7.8 million hectares of land

by end of 1958.

This was accompanied by a shift of industry from the cities to the countryside, peasants

could learn from the development of industry. Problem arose of how do you replace the peasants

taken for mass campaigns and industrial labour in the fields. Answer - women work the fields.

How do you then replace the household tasks preformed by the women? You centralize the tasks

of cooking, child rearing etc. This led to an increase in the size of the Communes, from the

higher producers cooperatives containing 200-300 families to the Communes of 3-4000 families.

- Initially Mao’s agricultural policies seemed to be vindicated. In 1958, promises of a fine harvest

led to the abolishing of private plots, and euphoria among the leadership.

- However, this proved to be short lived, many of the industrial enterprised proved to be dismal

failures (backyard furnaces), and subsequent harvest failed to yield any improvement.

- Trend among rural cadres to exaggerate the harvests to avoid the displeasure of the centre. This

led the centre to have no idea about the amount of grain actually availible. Series of natural

disasters in 1959. Led to a tremendous famine in the countryside - 20 to 30 million extra deaths

between 1959 and 1962. Peasants were reduced to eating corn cobs, tree barks, apricot pits and

virtually anything else that they could find.

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- Policy abandoned in 1959, when Mao stepped down as the head of state. Lushan Plenum and

Peng Dehuai - Peng had offered a private letter to Mao detailing his skepticism about the GLF

and tried to tell the emperor that he had no clothes on. Mao read the letter in public and the

Minister of Defense was purged.

September 15

- Challenge to the Soviets

- Need Not Worry - Worst Famine in a century

- Soviet Pullout - Note other reasons - Split end monolithic communism

- More or less the formal end of the Sino-Soviet alliance

Foreign Affairs:The Sino-Soviet Split

The Breaking of the Alliance 1958-60

The years of 1958-60 saw the end of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the two went from close, though

suspicious allies in 1950 to openly critical of each other by the early 1960s.

Reasons for the End

1. Ideological - The Great Leap Forward

- As mentioned earlier, Mao was very dissatisfied with the Soviet model of economic

development, he believed that it essentially led to the imposition of state capitalism - the cadres

and managers had take on the role of a new elite. He also contended that in order for communism

to succeed, that the political nature of humankind had to be changed.

- Decentralization of Decision Making,ideology, human will, mass mobilizations

- Failure Based on bizarre Economic Programs - Backyard Furnaces

- Mass Communizations

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- Challenge to the Soviets

- Need Not Worry - Worst Famine in a century

- Soviet Pullout - Note other reasons - Split end monolithic communism

- More or less the formal end of the Sino-Soviet alliance

2. Geographic - Unresolved border problems

3. Security

- Nuclear Weapons - The Soviets had agreed to provide the Chinese with a nuclear

weapon in 1957 and the arrangement was scuttled by Khrushchev prior to meeting Eisenhower in

1958.

- Soviets were terrified of being trapped into a conflict with the United States over something as

insignificant as Taiwan. Also, Mao had demonstrated a rather cavalier attitude to nuclear

weapons.

"The Atom bomb is a paper tiger with which the American reactionaries try to terrify the people.

It looks terrible, but in fact is not. Of course the atom bomb is a weapon of annihilation; but the

outcome of a war is decided by people and not by one or two new weapons."

- Argument that after WWI, Russia went socialist, WWII China and Eastern Europe, another

world war would lead to the world wide triumph of socialism. Dismissive of the casualties.

-The United States made no effort to disguise the possibility that it might employ nuclear

weapons against the PRC if the ceasefire negotiations to end the Korean War failed to produce a

result that they viewed as acceptable. Eisenhower made it quite clear that the United States

would not be dissuaded from considering using every weapon in its arsenal if the Chinese did not

adopt a less intransigent negotiating stance. The United States also threatened to use nuclear

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weapons during the Taiwan Straits crises of 1954-55 and 1958. While it may be argued that these

were threats that the United States would have hesitated to carry out, the Chinese could not

afford to be so sanguine. Their soil was being threatened by a class of weapons that they did not

possess, in effect they were the recipient of a threat that they could not match. The results of the

1958 incident also left China concerned about the credibility of extended deterrence provided by

the Soviet Union. The Soviet response to the American threat was rather ambiguous, they did not

equivocally state that they would enter the conflict even if China was directly attacked. The

Soviets only offered unconditional support after the crisis had passed and the issue was all but

resolved. The Chinese were not mollified by the Soviet response, in fact it increased their

determination to create a nuclear force not subject to Soviet control. This was an effort to remove

the ability of the United States to issue compellent threats to China.

The Chinese began their efforts to create a nuclear force in the wake of the first Quemoy

crisis in 1955. The Politburo appointed a three member committee to preside over policy making

for the nuclear weapons program, these three men were Bo Yibo, Chen Yun and Nie Rongzhen.

The stature of these men indicated the importance of this program to the Chinese Communist

Party. They secured Soviet support for this venture through the training of Chinese scientists in

the Soviet Union, the efforts of Soviet technicians in China, and the transfer of blueprints and a

Soviet prototype to the PRC.

In the latter half of the 1950's, Mao began to express increasing confidence in the military

strength of the Soviet Union and in the superiority of its nuclear force to that possessed by the

United States. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, Mao made his famous 'East Wind' speech:

I believe that it is characteristic of the situation today that the East

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 Wind is prevailing over the West Wind. That is to say, the forces

of socialism have become overwhelmingly superior to the forces of

imperialism.

Khrushchev was not as confident in the overwhelming superiority of the Soviet military. He did

not believe that the Soviet Union now had the power to issue compellent threats to the United

States, rather that this rough parity would ensure that war between the two states was no longer

inevitable.

The creation and expansion of the Soviet nuclear force led to disagreements between Mao

and Khrushchev as to how this force could best be employed. At the 20th CPSU congress,

Khrushchev put forth the policy of 'peaceful coexistence'; and the attendant idea that the struggle

for the hearts and minds of the emerging world could be waged on a socio-economic rather than

a military level. Mao believed that the Soviets were too reticent in the employment of their

military power, that the launch of Sputnik and the relevant inter-continental capability of Soviet

nuclear weapons should be used to further the goals of world revolution. Specifically, to further

the revolutionary goal of the Chinese to conquer Taiwan.

This dispute over the policy of peaceful co-existence was one of the primary causes of the

Sino-Soviet split, and led the Chinese to further question the resolve of the Soviet Union. This

caused them to intensify their efforts to create an independent nuclear force.

While the Soviets had promised to deliver a prototype atomic weapon to the PRC in

1955, by the late 1950's Khrushchev began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of this

decision (assuming that he intended to deliver the weapon in the first place). Mao's seemingly

flippant attitude to the consequences of war, and the brazen policies of the CCP led the Soviets to

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question whether they wished to supply China with the capability to embroil them in a nuclear

exchange with the United States. Khrushchev realized that an ally with a nascent nuclear

capability and limited signs of restraint might initiate a conflict that would force the Soviets to

either become involved or witness a nuclear attack on China.

This led to the Soviet decision, made in early 1958, not to supply China with further

nuclear assistance. At this time the prototype was actually packed and ready for shipment, and

the Chinese had prepared a room for the exhibition of the model. Initially the Soviets contended

that the room was not secure and the shipment would have to be delayed. Finally, in 1959, the

CCP's Central Committee received a letter from the corresponding body in the CPSU stating that

due to the negotiations taking place in Geneva (the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty) that Moscow would

be unable to supply them with blueprints, technical data, or the prototype itself.

The Chinese were outraged by this decision and saw this as a clear example of Moscow

placing Soviet-American relations over obligations to an ally. This was interpreted as being the

cost of Khrushchev's policy of peaceful co-existence, and Mao later claimed that this policy was

the first signs of Soviet revisionism.

- Natural Disasters

Retrenchement (1960-65)

- By 1960, the Great Leap Forward was over, all except for Mao judged the movement to be a

colossal failure. Mao was convinced that it was simply the failings of the local cadres that led to

the program’s lack of success. The people had not been properly motivated - again, he was living

in an unreal world, where the truth seldom penetrated.

- The problem that confronted the country was how do they begin to repair the damage of the

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GLF. The answer was a return to the planned economy of the first five year plan. Now, we have,

and will continue to hear of the shortcomings of a planned economy, but it is nirvana when

compared to the chaos of Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

- Future growth was to be based on Pragmatism, there were not going to be any great leaps or

grand economic schemes, rather the emphasis was on steady economic growth.

- In terms of agriculture, Chen Yun - the early opponent of the GLF (mention his passing this

summer and how he related to Deng)-

made a trip to the countryside in the summer of 1961 and was horrified by the conditions he

encountered. In a visit to a commune near Shanghai he found peasants, who should have been

prospering due to their proximity to the market, instead facing dire straits. He argued that

agricultural policy must be based on best meeting their needs - therefore, the material incentives

for the farmers were reintroduced, the private plots (now 6% of the total land) were restored, the

size of the communes was to be reduced to 20 to 30 families,1 and investment in agriculture was

to be increased. In short, the new agricultural policy was intended to be more pragmatic, and less

dependent on the ideological motivations of Mao. This trend toward more tangible rewards for

effort also played on the growing cynicism in the countryside re the Communist Party. The

peasants had been asked to make enormous sacrifices during the GLF, and the results were

catastrophic. This led to a serious questioning of the party. However, it is useful to mention that

Mao was never publicly blamed for the mistakes of the GLF. He represented an important

symbol for the revolution and one that could not be tarnished.

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- This did not mean that the peasants were dispossessed. Rather it simply meant that the
unit of accounting was changed. Meaning that instead of a quota being imposed for 3,000

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 Chen’s visit to the countryside also revealed an unsuspected level of corruption and abuse

by local officials. In rural China, the local officials had often utilized the increased freedom that

they had been granted to line their own pockets and to protect those that they favored from the

harshest conditions of the famine. In order to meet the quotas, they confiscated grain from the

weakest of the peasants or those who were not in their favor. Widespread abuses were reported

where the peasants gambled, or even engaged in the sale of local girls as “wives” to other cadres

or peasants in other villages. At that time the going rate for a 14 year old girl was 750 yuan and

on occasion a girl was “married” 13 times.

There were two schools of thought as to how best handle this corruption in the

countryside. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Chen Yun all believed that the correction of these

matters was best achieved by internal means. The imposition of tighter controls on the local

officials and the sending down of cadres from the centre as investigators was seen as the best

manner in which to combat these local abuses.

September 18

On the other hand, Mao believed that the castigation of the local leaders should be a

public matter and should be undertaken by the people themselves. There was also a dispute over

the causes of these problems, Li, et al, believed that they stemmed from a lack of control by the

centre, while Mao believed that they were a natural result of a bureaucratized system that

promoted the CCP cadres as a new elite. Mao believed that continuous revolution was necessary

to remove those who had adopted pretentions of the elite, and were displaying capitalist

tendencies. Explain Mao’s ideas of permanent revolution and how this would come to be in the

families, it would now be imposed for 20 to 30 families.

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PRC.

This got to the heart of Mao’s differences with the planners such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng

Xiaoping. He believed that their adherence to the Soviet model would basically be the

reintroduction of capitalism under another name.

Mao's Dissatisfaction with the Soviet Model

1. Education - Red vs. Expert

2. Policy Planning - Mass Line

3. Emergence of new elites

4. Resource Allocation

5. Economic Growth - human will vs economic planning

6. Permanent Revolution

Of course, there were practical considerations involved as well, Mao had seen his power

base erode steadily since the failure of the GLF. He had essentially retired from day to day

decision making and was chafing at his newfound inactivity. Further, the reimposition of the

planned economy clashed with his vision of the revolution.

- Mao is treated "like a dead uncle"

- He would go back to the countryside and form a new Red Army

- Essentially, this is what happened during the cultural revolution. While it was a power struggle

between Mao and the other leaders of the CCP, this was not bereft of issues, at stake was the

future direction of policy in China.

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