• 1950-1953: New Democracy
Period
• 1953-1958: First 5 Year
Plan/Soviet Model
• 1958-1960: Great Leap Forward
1949-1953: Honeymoon or
State Terror?
• Early 1950s ‘Honeymoon’: Stability, Rebuilding, Inclusive
rhetoric of ‘new Democracy’
• ‘State Terror’: 1949-1950: Anti-prostitution, anti-drug
campaigns in major cities
• 1950: Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionaries
• 1951: Three Antis Campaign (campaign to eliminate
corruption, waste, obstructionist bureaucracy among
party members and factory managers
• 1952: Five Antis Campaign ( campaign attacking those
industrialists and capitalists that had stayed in China
after 1949)
The Soviet Model and the First
Five Year Plan 1953-1958
--This is a development model that stresses technology
and organization, not ideology
--prioritizes industry over agriculture—main source of
capital accumulation taken from agriculture to serve
industry (to feed it)
--Stress on large-scale units—integrated production
plants—factory as community and work unit
--Emphasis on Material incentives for workers (as opposed
to moral/ideological)
--City prioritized over countryside
The Hundred Flowers
Campaign
• 1957: Mao encourages ‘one hundred flowers to
bloom, one hundred schools of though to
contend’
• A period of liberalization in which criticism of the
Chinese Communist Party was encouraged
• Mao hoped that the criticisms would match his
own distaste of the Soviet model
• Intellectual’s criticisms go far beyond this and
Mao orders an ‘anti-rightist’ crackdown against
those who put for criticism
Collectivization in the Countryside
• 1950-1953: Land Reform, “Honeymoon”
Period
Removes traditional rural elites
Restoration of markets
Distributes land to all individuals
Does not: Increase agricultural production
Mutual Aid Teams
• Mutual Aid Teams (MAT)
A voluntary policy
Farmers encouraged to pool resources—
tools, labor, farm animals—to increase
production
Land still privately owned
Typically involve 5-15 families
Small Agricultural Producer
Cooperatives (APC)
• Land Still Privately Owned, but pooled and
collectively farmed.
• Distribution of harvest (profit) based on
combination of your land contribution and
labor contribution
• 20-40 families
• Hope was that by 1957, 1/3 of agricultural
households would be in small APC
Large Agricultural Producer
Cooperatives
•
•
•
•
NOT voluntary
abolished land ownership
rewards for labor input, not land input
Highly unpopular
Towards Disaster: Carrying out the
“Great Leap Forward”
• Return to the core qualities of revolution
loved by Mao—speed, rural focus, mass
action
• China= “poor and blank”—this is powerful,
not negative
• People power, not industrial/bureaucratic
expertise will propel China to a utopian
future
People’s Communes
• Highest stage of collectivization in the
countryside=communes
• Comprise many villages, tens of thousands of
people
• Elimination of ALL private property, destruction
of ALL rural markets, elimination of money.
• “to each according to their needs”—the state
provides for all—no matter what you do!
Furnaces and Communal Dining
• Backyard furnaces—we don’t need
expertise or large factories to make
steel—farmers can do it!
• Eat all you want, for free, abundant
harvest is just around the corner
• Communal mess halls—no more cooking
for your family
The Consequences: THE WORST FAMINE
IN RECORDED HUMAN HISTORY
• Communes have unprecedented power to
mobilize people—but do so recklessly,
exhausting people on pointless projects
• Nobody farming enough
• Communes inflating harvest figures to look
good to the state
• No tools or fuel—burned up in furnaces
Famine
• No food= 30 MILLION DEATHS between
1959 and 1961
• No relief—a nationwide catastrophe
• People forced to eat bark, grass, finally
dirt, and even other people