![]() ![]() Local leaders competed with one another to see who could create the most activity. They built backyard furnaces for iron and steel and worked together on massive building projects, including one undertaken during the winter of 1957-58 in which more than 100 million peasants were mobilized to build large-scale water-conservation works. People were mobilized to accomplish the goals of industrialization. Government spending on heavy industry grew in 1958 to represent 56 percent of state capital investment, an increase from 38 percent in 1956. The government also plunged the country into a deep debt by increasing spending on the development of heavy industry. The crackdown led to the deaths of 550,000 people by 1958. In pursuit of its goals, the government executed people who did not agree with the pace of radical change. Any semblance of serious planning was abandoned," Yang said. Even more exaggerated targets were subsequently presented, and then frequently revised upward, for steel, grain, cotton and other products. "Frequent changes in the timetable were symptomatic of the Great Leap, which, in retrospect, was fantasy incarnate. Other Chinese leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, supported Mao's enthusiasm, according to documents Yang studied in China.Ī year later, Mao radically revised the timeline for catching up to Britain - what was to be accomplished in 15 years now had to be done in just one more year, he said. This utopian dream turned into a nightmare as the central leadership grew increasingly out of touch with reality, Yang found through his study of government records and personal accounts.Īt the beginning of the Great Leap Forward, Mao proclaimed that China would overtake Britain in production of steel and other products within 15 years. These changes were intended to improve conditions for everyone by collectivizing agriculture and establishing communal eating facilities where peasants could eat all they wanted free of charge. ![]() As a result of the Communist revolution, landowners had been stripped of their property, and by 1957 peasants already were forced to work in agricultural cooperatives. The rural society was to keep pace with the dream by producing enough food to feed the country plus enough for export to help pay for industrialization. Mao wanted China to become a leading industrial power, and to accomplish his goals he and his colleagues pushed for the construction of steel plants across the country. The Great Leap Forward was begun in 1957 by Chairman Mao Zedong to bring the nation quickly into the forefront of economic development. It was the pivotal event that led China to adopt reforms in rural areas after Mao's death in 1976, resulting in the dismantlement of the people's communes that the Chinese government had fervently advocated during the Great Leap Forward. Unlike the later Cultural Revolution, which is well known in the West, the Great Leap Forward has been less of a focus for research by Western scholars - yet, according to Yang, it was one of the most influential periods of Chinese history. The book, one of the first major works to analyze the period, relates how the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent famine still influence China today. ![]() Yang's curiosity about the period led him to write the book Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine, to be published this spring by Stanford University Press. "They would often bring up the topic of the Great Leap famine and tell how bad things were during that time." We grew wheat in the area where I lived, and they were part of a production team," said Yang, who was born in 1964, three years after the Great Leap Forward had ended. "My parents were peasants who worked in the field. China's Great Leap ForwardAs a child growing up in rural China, Dali Yang, Assistant Professor in Political Science, heard the stories of his parents and others about the horrors of the Great Leap Forward, a time of suffering for China that came soon after the Communist revolution in 1949. ![]()
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