The Great Leap Forward

In the mid-20th century, Chairman Mao Zedong launched an ambitious plan to revolutionize Chinese agriculture and industry, build up the economy and turn China into a communist utopia. Read the show notes here.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff you missed in History class from
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast on Tracy.
Today we are starting on a little mini series about
the People's Republic of China under the leadership of Chairman

(00:23):
Mao Zogong, and over the next few weeks, we're going
to talk about three different but kind of interconnected events
from this period. One is the Great Leap Forward, and
that's what we're talking about today. The next one is
the Great Famine, and we will end with a discussion
of the Cultural Revolution. So to be clear, this is
a just enormous junk of Chinese history. It spans decades,

(00:47):
and on top of that, China is an enormous country
that is not remotely monolithic. There are very major cultural
distinctions among its provinces and the people who lived there.
There are a lot of people who were involved in
some way who we won't specifically mentioned, and there are
lots of other events that are kind of connected in
some way but not as closely. Uh, none of these

(01:08):
episodes are meant to be an exhaustive accounting of every
single person and action and consequence involved in this whole story.
That's really true of I guess every episode that we do,
but given the scope of these um it seemed particularly
worth mentioning. Even though we are having basically a multi
part series on this, it is still not going to

(01:29):
be an exhaustive recitation of every single fact. We will, however,
list all the sources that were used in the show
notes if you want more detail later on. So, the
first of these three installments is The Greatly Forward, which
was Mao's plan to revolutionize the Chinese economy and turn
it into a communist utopia. So for background, Mao Zedong

(01:53):
was born in Hunan Province on December when China was
still under imperial rule home The emperor abdicated in nineteen
twelve following a revolution, and at that point ma was
eighteen years old. He trained as a teacher before working
in a University of Library in Beijing, and while there
he became interested in Marxist philosophy. In nineteen twenty one,

(02:17):
he became a founder member of the Chinese Communist Party,
also known as the CCP. Between nineteen twenty three and
nineteen forty nine, the CCP was sometimes allied with and
sometimes at war with, the Kumintang National Party or the KMT.
The two parties united to drive warlords out of northern China,

(02:38):
and they also united to fight Japan during the Second
Sign of Japanese War, which ran from nineteen thirty seven
to nineteen forty five, so it ended right after World
War Two did. But between these two events and afterward
they were adversaries. After the Sign of Japanese War ended,
the CCP and KMT went to war against each other.

(02:58):
The CCP was actorious and on October one of ninety nine,
Mao founded the People's Republic of China. At this point,
China was really a very poor and mostly a grarian nation,
and it was recovering from years and years of war
fought on its own soil. It's per capita gross domestic
product was only a quarter of the United Kingdoms. The

(03:22):
newly founded Nations government wanted to end poverty and famine
and then put the Chinese economy on par with the UK,
and at first the government's primary goal was simply to
recover from the war. There was widespread damage to both
the nation's agricultural and industrial systems, and so the government
set to work nationalizing the financial sector and other industries,

(03:45):
and it also got help from the Soviet Union, which
sent financial support and about ten thousand engineers to help
bolster Chinese industry. In the process, China's economy moved from
a capitalists supply and demand model to a socialist model.
The Soviet Union also provided the basic blueprint for China's
first phase of economical and industrial growth. Following the example

(04:08):
of the Soviet Union's economy and focused on increasing its
heavy industry, the People's Republic of China started its first
five year Plan in nineteen fifty three. This plan was
meant to increase the nation's production of steel, coal, and iron,
and to do this, China took control of various industries
and just set really ambitious targets for growth. By nineteen

(04:29):
fifty six, virtually all the major industries in China were
either state owned or joint public private enterprises. China also
more than doubled and in some cases more than tripled
its output of coal, pig iron, steel, and oil. At
the same time, China turned its small family farms into collectives,

(04:49):
so land and farm animals and equipment were all gathered
up and redistributed and shared among all the agricultural workers.
Families were allowed to keep a small farm plot for
their own use so they could keep growing their own food,
and by ninety seven almost all of China's farms were
part of a collective. Overall, these efforts in the first

(05:11):
five year plan were successful. Production was up, harvests were bountiful,
and farmers who had been struggling with tiny plots of
land and insufficient equipment now for the most part had
the things they needed thanks to the redistribution efforts. But
at the same time, this industrial expansion had really strained
the overall Chinese economy, and on the agricultural front, the

(05:33):
harvests were bigger, but the population got bigger too, and
pretty much across the board, people were working harder than before,
so they needed to eat more food than before. So
while the harvests were bigger, this didn't actually lead to
a surplus the way had it had been originally planned. Basically,
industrial growth had outpaced what the agricultural growth could support,

(05:57):
which is the problem that China was faced with trying
to solve next. And before we get to that, so
to get to what China tried to do to match
its cultural or it's agricultural and its industrial growth. In
ninety six, Mao invited Chinese intellectuals to criticize the government
and its policies. So the whole idea was that new

(06:18):
ideas from the intellectual community, we're going to put China
on the right path to modernization. And this campaign was
known as the hundred Flowers Campaign. Its slogan was, let
a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.
So poetic, it sounds sort of pretty does sound like
a really good idea when you put it that way, Yeah,

(06:41):
I could see where people would get behind it. However,
that did not play out as planned. Uh. It took
a while for people to speak up initially, but then
when they did, they vocally and pretty pointedly criticized just
about every single aspect of China's government and policy. A
big undertone was that the government might be achieving its goals,

(07:02):
but that the people were really suffering for it. In
July of nineteen fifty seven, the government started cracking down
on dissenters. People who had spoken against the government lost
their jobs and went to prison or were sent to
forced labor camps. So, instead of making the government more
open and encouraging dialogue, the hundred Flowers Campaign actually had

(07:24):
the exact opposite effect, and this had two major consequences. One,
a lot of great thinkers who were supposed to influence
China's future direction were completely silenced, and to whatever the
government did next, people were probably not going to speak
up about it or protest it in any overt way. Consequently,

(07:45):
in ninety eight, nine years after coming to power, when
Mao sat down a new plan called the Great Leap Forward.
Nobody really objected to it, and there weren't really vocal
protests even as things started to go wrong with it.
The Great Leap for word, was intended to move away
from a Soviet inspired model and into a truly Chinese

(08:05):
system of communism. Rather than mostly focusing on heavy industry
as the Soviet Union did, it was going to revolutionize
both industry and agriculture at the same time. The Great
Leap Forward was partly a plan for progress and partly
a propaganda campaign. The former was just a really incredibly
ambitious five year plan to fix the imbalance between industrial

(08:29):
growth and agricultural growth, and the propaganda part included everything
from an anti rightist campaign that was meant to discredit
all the people who had spoken out during the hundred
flowers to a campaign for people to write new folk
songs about China. So the goal was to surpass England
in fifteen years and to be economically on par with

(08:52):
the United States in thirty years. A big part of
this plan was fundamentally once again changing how the farms worked,
and as we mentioned uh, China's farms had already been
consolidated into collectives during the first five year plan. The
Great Leap Forward planned to further consolidate these collectives into communes.

(09:12):
MAW believed that bigger communes would be better economically and
would encourage social equality. Every group in a commune had
thirty or so families in it, and combined the communes
each had as many as five thousand families. Each commune
also had its own administration team at the top, a
production brigade which was kind of like the middle management layer,

(09:35):
and the workers. These communes were for the most part
governed at the provincial level. They actually tried various different
strategies for governing and that's where it eventually netted out.
All in all, there were about twenty six thousand of
these communes, and in the spring and summer of ninety
eight percent of China's farms became part of a commune,

(09:58):
and a few provinces, most notably Hanan and Habei, the
commune model was taken to an extreme. People relinquished all
of their personal property. Villages were split up, and residents
lived in dormitories instead of their homes. Living conditions in
these dormitories was often very poor and very overcrowded. In
the model provinces, families were broken up too, and spouses

(10:21):
and siblings were sent to different working assignments. UH. In
most places, people were fed in collective canteens, and in
some of these provinces UH everyone's personal kitchen stuff was
confiscated and either destroyed or used at the canteen to
basically make people eat in the communal canteen. Not every

(10:44):
commune got to this level with the dormitories and the
confiscated utensils, but that was really the ideal communicate. Communal daycares,
kindergartens and nursing homes are also established to care for
the very young and the very old, and this meant
that domestic work, so feeding people, cleaning up with the
living spaces, caring for children and elders, had been collectivized,

(11:06):
so women who had typically done this work in family
situations became part of the labor force in fields and
factories Instead, those who still had children to look after
were often given agricultural assignments closer to home, while women
who had no children would be sent to factories to work.
In addition, pretty much everywhere, farmers were no longer allowed

(11:28):
to keep personal farm plots to grow their own food.
Mao made a tour of China in early nine in
support of the Great Leap Forward, and he met with
provincial leaders to convince them that it was really the
way to go together with you. Chao Chi, the party's
second highest leader, Mao put together goals for production that
were then broken down by province, and each of these

(11:50):
goals had a maximum plan and a minimum plan. But
when they told people what these goals were, they said
that the maximum was actually the minimum. And then when
administrators told the working brigades what the goals were, they
did the same thing, And then the production brigades did
the same thing when they told the workers what their

(12:11):
goals were. So essentially, because everybody was telling the people
below them that their maximum target was really the minimum target,
production goals quickly became astronomical, and that August Chinese leadership
added another element to the mix. In a utopian spirit,
they encouraged the creation of so called backyard steel furnaces

(12:33):
in the communes, so in addition to agricultural work, the
communes would be home to smaller scale industrial efforts. So
when farm workers had downtime, like when they were not
producing as much in the agriculture side of things, they
would then be working in these backyard operations. Plus, there
were massive infrastructure projects in the works. New roads and

(12:54):
railroads were built to move all of this additional food
and products from place to play. This huge network of dams, reservoirs,
and irrigation systems was built to try to manage the
nation water the nations waterways, and provide irrigation to all
these new farms. In some places it was almost like terraforming.

(13:15):
There were attempts to fill entire lakes in, to dry
out wetlands and to quote tame the rivers, to turn
every possible square inch of land into farmland and running
concurrently with this agricultural overhaul was a focus on continuing
to expand China's existing industries and all of this had

(13:36):
kind of had a whiff of feudalism about it. The
workers were passing up their harvest to the commune administrators,
they were passing things up to the greater government. Um
so it sort of reminds you of of a medieval
situation where people are passing up their work to the
next layer. Uh in ninety eight reported agricultural production and

(14:00):
was tremendous, and output in the industrial sector jumped by
and in ninety nine it all started to fall apart.
As you can imagine, thanks to these rapidly escalating production targets.
The laborers who were doing all the work had to
just work frantically, literally to the point of dropping from

(14:20):
exhaustion at their posts. The administrators vastly overreported how big
their harvests had been so it would look like they
had met their completely unreachable goals. The government, believing that
they had a surplus based on these reports, gave the
order for the communal canteens to basically serve a constant feast,

(14:41):
and they kept selling grain to pay off war debts
and pay for all this farm equipment that had been purchased,
and continued to provide food and monetary aid to other
nations as part of their foreign aid program, and because
farmers were now working hard all year long rather than
offsetting the planting and harvesting seasons with months of sure
people needed more food to eat than they had before. Consequently,

(15:06):
China ran out of food, and the resulting famine was
one of the negative consequences of the Great Leap Forward,
and we're going to have a whole episode on that
later on. And while it did definitely meaningfully add to
China's infrastructure and at least at first increase its agricultural
and industrial output, the Great Leap Forward had several negative

(15:27):
consequences beyond just the famine issue. Disease rates really soared.
Typhus outbreaks were frequent, but fortunately they were isolated really
quickly so they didn't turn into epidemics. Hepatitis and malaria
became really widespread. Hygiene was a huge problem, especially among
workers who were living in collective living living situations. The

(15:50):
Great Leap Forward years also saw a huge spike in
both suicides and violent deaths as the situation became more
desperate when people didn't have food to eating anymore, and
a lot of the industrial work proved to be of
inferior quality. The railroads that were being built were plagued
with problems. The metals that were being smelted didn't hold up.

(16:11):
Dams that had been built to tame the rivers collapsed.
One damn broke in nineteen seventy five and drowned about
two hundred and thirty thousand people. There were also problems
with China's factory goods. The cost of all the materials
that would be needed to scale up the factory's output
had not really been factored into the plan very well,

(16:32):
so a lot of these new goods were being made
very poorly, with also very shoddy materials that have been
gotten for a low cost. Since China was exporting most
of these new factory goods, the government wound up having
to repay other nations when they complained that what they
got was defective, mislabeled, or damaged. The cost was really enormous,

(16:54):
somewhere between two hundred and three hundred million Union in
nineteen fifty nine alone. The continual escalation of production targets
and the obvious crackdown on descent combined to inspire an
enormous amount of corruption and fraud at basically every layer
of government as people tried to conceal what was going
wrong and just how badly the situation had derailed. The

(17:19):
Great Leap Forward also contributed to a split in Sino
Soviet relations. Although the Soviet Union had initially supported China's
effort to collectivize the farms and transform itself into a
leading communist nation, Nikita Krushchev eventually became openly critical of
the Great Leap Forward, particularly the People's Communes, and Mao

(17:40):
did not like this criticism. Also, Mao was motivated by
an unstated desire for China to surpass the Soviet Union
and surpass it by a pretty hefty margin as a
socialist nation. While he didn't say this out loud, this
is pretty obvious to people. Khrushchev wrote in his own
memo Wires that he saw that China was headed for

(18:02):
disaster and did everything that he could to dissuade mouth
from the path that he was on. By October of
nineteen fifty nine, the relationship between the two nations had
really cooled, although it was not declared officially over the
policies and practices of the Great Leap Forward mostly stopped
In nineteen sixty one, a new set of rules, which

(18:24):
is called Work Regulations on Rural Communes also called the
sixty Articles, came out to govern how the communes were run.
This put an end to the dining halls in the
backyard steel operations. It also allowed people to have personal
plots of land again so they could grow their own
personal food rather than relying on the government to provide
for them. The People's Communes, which had been created for

(18:48):
the Great Leap Forward, were eventually abolished in nineteen two,
and as we said earlier, this also had the consequence
of a really major famine, which is going to be
the next installment in this mini series. Do you have
a bit of listener mail for us? Yes, I knew.
This is actually two different posts from our Facebook wall,

(19:08):
and I had a conversation with each of these two
people to kind of clarify what I was trying to say,
so I thought probably I should clarify it for other people. Also,
one is from David who said, I heard your podcast
about the coal miners. Great episode, but we have to
lay off word sensitivity. In my opinion, the only people
who should determine whether a word or label is offensive

(19:28):
or derogatory or those the term is directly applied to
I'm talking about the term redneck specifically and anything else generally.
We're given a constitutional right freedom of speech, but no
amendment protects us from being offended. Keep up the great work.
I've been listening constantly for several years now, and I
don't plan to stop. And the other note was from
John who said, I strongly strongly object to your mistreatment

(19:51):
of the label redneck, acting like it is some horrible slur.
Maybe things are different in Georgia than they are in
Kent County, Maryland. So as I'm engined, I had like
conversations with both of them kind of clarify what I meant. Uh.
We alluded in the previous episode on the Battle of
Blair Mountain um which Holly read part of the outline,

(20:13):
but I wrote it, so those were my words. Um,
that a lot of people use the word redneck as
really an epithet, Like when I hear people who would
not call themselves redneck call other people that word, it
is often with a whole lot of venom. Holly. Yeah.

(20:33):
Holly has pointed out that it is often preceded by
the words stupid. Um. It is often also in my
experience preceded by some profanity. Um, So I'm not at
all saying that people should not use the word to
describe themselves if they would like to. Like both both
John and David kind of pointed me to communities who

(20:57):
used the word and it's not meant as a judge
it at all. Um, But I hear so many people
who would not identify themselves that way use it about
other people in a really disparaging word. And a lot
of these are folks who would really consider themselves otherwise
to be socially conscious and progressive people, and they don't

(21:20):
seem to quite register that what they are doing is
judging someone else's worth as a human being, a lot
of times based on nothing other than their accent and
the clothes they have on. So that's where I was
coming from with that, Like, yeah, I mean you and
I have talked about this before, that like uh, in
relation to other words that are sometimes considered slurged by

(21:41):
some people and not by others. That like, I'm very uh,
you know, reluctant. I don't want to trim the linguistic
tree every time a jerk uses a word in a
way that it was not necessarily intended, But at the
same time, I think everybody does have to be a
little bit mindful and just not be a jerk, right
I was. I was definitely not advocating for banning words

(22:04):
from the English language, and I think, usually speaking for
myself personally, if if I say you shouldn't use that word,
there's sort of an undertone of like, if you are
mindful about what you're saying, really, um where Like where
it gets into some frustration territory for me is that

(22:25):
having lived in the South for almost forty years and
in the Deep South for more than a decade, it's
pretty evident that Southern people are one of the very
very few groups in the United States who it's still
okay to make just disparaging, horrible comments about from a

(22:45):
social context, Like if someone were to make a racist comment,
a lot of times the people around them would call
them on it and say, hey, that's not cool. But
if somebody makes a joke about Southerners being ignorant, a
lot of times there is not that kind of Hey,
that's a stereotype and it's not cool. Um. So to
clarify all that, use words mindfully examine in yourself what

(23:10):
you're saying about someone before you use epithets about them
is all I'm saying about that. Yeah, and if you're
going to use them, at least understand what you're doing.
You might be a jerk, but your a jerk and
understands what you're doing. Yes, if you can. If you're
intending to be a jerk, using epithets and slurs against

(23:32):
other people is a pretty easy way to do that. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can.
We're at history podcast that how Stuffworks dot com. We're
also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash mist in
history and on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler
is missed in History at tumbler dot com, and our
pinterest is pinterest dot com slash missed in History. We
have a pretty new still spread shirts store where you

(23:54):
can buy shirts and phone cases and all kinds of
other stuff and that isn't missed in History dot and
shirt dot com. If you would like to learn more
about what we've talked about today, can come to our
parent company's website, which is how Stuff Works dot com.
You can put into the search bar socialism for communism
to read how socialism works or how communism works or

(24:15):
you can come to our website, where as we said before,
we will have all the sources that were used for
this episode. If you want to learn more about the details, um,
you can do all of that and a whole lot
more at our websites, which are how stuff works dot
com and missed in History dot com. For more on

(24:35):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com.