Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward was a campaign launched by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party in 1958 to transform China rapidly from an agrarian into an industrial and communist society. It organised the countryside into huge people's communes and mobilised millions to make steel in backyard furnaces. The campaign caused a collapse in farm output and, with state grain procurement continuing, one of the deadliest famines in history, in which scholarly estimates of excess deaths range from about 15 million to 45 million or more.

By 1957 the new People's Republic had completed its first five-year plan on the Soviet model. Mao, impatient with gradual progress and increasingly at odds with the Soviet leadership, believed that mass mobilisation and revolutionary enthusiasm could make up for a lack of capital and machinery. He set the goal of overtaking Britain's industrial output within fifteen years. The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 had already silenced many critics, including economists and officials who might have urged caution.

In 1958 rural cooperatives were merged into some 25,000 people's communes, each averaging around 5,000 households. Private plots were abolished, and in many places peasants ate in communal canteens, often freely at first. Labour was organised along military lines and drawn away from farming into irrigation works and industry. Pseudo-scientific farming methods, such as very close planting and deep ploughing, were imposed and reduced yields. A campaign against the "four pests" killed huge numbers of sparrows, which allowed insect pests to multiply.

To double steel output in a year, the party encouraged communes, schools and urban districts to build small furnaces. Millions of people fed them with fuel, including timber, and with household pots and tools. The official target was reported to have been met, but much of the metal produced was of poor quality or useless, and the harvest suffered as labour was diverted.

Under political pressure, local officials reported enormous harvests that did not exist. The state set its grain procurement on the basis of these figures, taking grain from villages that had too little left to eat, and China continued to export grain. In mid-1959, at the Lushan Conference, Defence Minister Peng Dehuai criticised the campaign in a private letter to Mao. Mao denounced him, Peng was dismissed, and a new campaign against "right deviation" made officials even less willing to report the truth. The famine was at its worst from 1959 to 1961, above all in provinces such as Sichuan, Anhui and Henan. Besides starvation, many people died from violence by cadres enforcing quotas and discipline.

By 1960 and 1961 the leadership began to change course. Communes were reduced in size, canteens were closed, private plots restored and grain imported. At a large party gathering in early 1962, the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, Liu Shaoqi spoke of the disaster as largely man-made, and Mao made a limited self-criticism. Day-to-day policy passed to Liu, Deng Xiaoping and other pragmatists, who restored more stable economic planning.

The number of deaths cannot be known precisely and is calculated from demographic data. Estimates depend on method and assumptions: many demographers and historians give figures of about 30 million, the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng about 36 million, and the historian Frank Dikötter at least 45 million, while some lower estimates suggest 15 to 23 million. The famine was long a taboo subject in China, and the party's official verdicts acknowledge grave errors without giving a full account of the deaths.

Mao's resentment of the retreat from his policies contributed to his launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, in which Liu and Deng were purged.

Our 1960 map shows the People's Republic of China during the Great Leap Forward, within broadly the same borders as today.