The Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward was a push by Mao Zedong to change China from a predominantly
agrarian (farming) society to a modern, industrial society in just five years.
Between 1958 and 1960, millions of Chinese citizens were moved onto communes. Some were sent to farming
cooperatives, while others worked in small manufacturing. All work was shared on the communes; from childcare to
cooking, daily tasks were collectivized.
Mao hoped to increase China's agricultural output. He relied, however, on untested farming ideas, such as planting
crops very close together so that they could support one another, and plowing
up to six feet deep to encourage root growth.
Mao also wanted to free China from the need to import steel and machinery.
He encouraged people to set up back-yard steel furnaces, where citizens
could turn scrap metal (and their own pots, pans and farm implements) into
usable steel.
The results were predictably bad. Backyard smelters run by peasants with no
metallurgy training produced such low-quality iron that it was worthless.
Over just a few years, the Great Leap Forward caused massive environmental damage in
China. The backyard steel production plan resulted in entire forests being burned to fuel
the smelters, which left the land open to erosion. Dense cropping and deep ploughing
stripped the farmland and left it vulnerable, as well.
When autumn of 1958 came, many areas had a bumper crop, since the soil was not yet
exhausted. However, so many farmers had been sent into steel production work that
there weren't enough hands to harvest the crops.
Anxious commune leaders vastly exaggerated their harvests, hoping to gain favor with the
Communist leadership. As a result, Party officials carried off most of the food to serve as the cities' share of the harvest,
leaving the farmers with nothing to eat. People in the countryside began to starve.
The next year, the Yellow River flooded, killing 2 million people either by drowning or by starvation after crop failures. In
1960, a wide-spread drought added to the nation's misery.
In the end, through a combination of disastrous economic policy and adverse weather conditions,
an estimated 20 to 48 million people died in China. Most starved to death in the countryside. The
official death toll from the Great Leap Forward is "only" 14 million, but most scholars agree that
this is a substantial underestimate.
The Great Leap Forward was supposed to be a 5-year plan, but it was called off after just three
tragic years. The period between 1958 and 1960 is known as the "Three Bitter Years" in China.
By 1959, it was obvious that the Great Leap Forward had been a failure and even Mao admitted
this. He called on the Communist Party to take him to task over his failures but also asked his own
party members to look at themselves and their performance.
"The chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility.
Comrades, you must all analyse your own responsibility. If you have to
fart, fart. You will feel much better for it."
The Cultural Revolution
Between 1966 and 1976, the young people of China rose up in an effort to purge the nation of the "Four Olds": old
customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas.
In August, 1966, Mao Zedong called for the start of a Cultural Revolution at the
Meeting of the Communist Central Committee. He urged the creation of corps of
"Red Guards" to punish party officials and any other persons who showed
bourgeois tendencies.
Mao likely was motivated to call for the so-called Cultural Revolution in order to rid
the Chinese Communist Party of his opponents after the tragic failure of his Great
Leap Forward policies. Mao knew that other party leaders were planning to
marginalize him, so he appealed directly to his supporters among the people to
join him in a Cultural Revolution. He also believed that communist revolution had
to be a continuous process, in order to stave off capitalist ideas.
Mao's call was answered by the students, some as young as elementary school,
who organized themselves into the first groups of Red Guards. They were joined
later by workers and soldiers. These young people
were guided by what became known as Mao’s Red
Book, a book of the quotations of Chairman Mao.
Students and Red Guard activists studied the
quotations of Chairman Mao to find justification for
their actions. Mao’s thoughts were to replace
thousands of years of Chinese philosophy, which, the students believed, had led to
weakness and inequality.
The first targets of the Red Guards included Buddhist temples, churches and mosques,
which were razed to the ground or converted to other uses. Sacred texts, as well as
Confucian writings, were burned, along with religious statues and other artwork. Any
object associated with China's pre-revolutionary past was liable to be destroyed.
In their fervor, the Red Guards began to persecute people deemed "counter-revolutionary" or "bourgeois," as well. The
Guards conducted so-called "struggle sessions," in which they heaped abuse and public humiliation upon people
accused of capitalist thoughts (usually these were teachers, monks and other educated persons). These sessions often
included physical violence, and many of the accused died or ended up being held in reeducation camps for years.
According to the Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, almost 1,800 people were
killed in Beijing alone in August and September of 1966.
By February, 1967, China had descended into chaos. The purges had
reached the level of army generals who dared to speak out against the
excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and Red Guards groups were turning
against one another and fighting in the streets. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing,
encouraged the Red Guards to raid arms from the People's Liberation
Army (PLA), and even to replace the army entirely if necessary.
By December of 1968, even Mao realized that the Cultural Revolution was
spinning out of control. China's economy, already weakened by the Great
Leap Forward, was faltering badly. Industrial production fell by 12% in just two years. In reaction, Mao issued a call for
the "Down to the Countryside Movement," in which young cadres from the city were sent to live on farms and learn
from the peasants. Although he spun this idea as a tool for leveling society, in fact Mao sought to disperse the Red
Guards across the country, so that they could not cause so much trouble anymore.
With the worst of the street violence over, the Cultural Revolution in the following six or seven years revolved primarily
around struggles for power in the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party. By 1971, Mao and his second-incommand, Lin Biao, were trading assassination attempts against one another. On September 13, 1971, Lin and his family
tried to fly to the Soviet Union, but their plane crashed. Officially, it ran out of fuel or had engine failure, but there is
speculation that the plane was shot down either by Chinese or Soviet officials.
Mao was aging quickly, and his health was failing. One of the main players in the succession game was his wife, Jiang
Qing. She and three cronies, called the "Gang of Four," controlled most of China's media, and railed against moderates
such as the Deng Xiaoping (who had spent time in a “reeducation camp”) and Zhou Enlai, one of the most moderate and
thoughtful of the Communist revolutionaries. Although the politicians were still enthusiastic about purging their
opponents, the Chinese people had lost their taste for the movement.
Zhou Enlai died in January of 1976, and popular grief over his death turned into demonstrations against the Gang of Four
and even against Mao. In April, as many as 2 million people flooded Tiananmen Square for Zhou Enlai's memorial service
- and the mourners publicly denounced Mao and Jiang Qing. That July, the Great Tangshan Earthquake accentuated the
Communist Party's lack of leadership in the face of tragedy, further eroding public support. Jiang Qing even went on the
radio to urge the people not to allow the earthquake to distract them from criticizing Deng Xiaoping for his moderate
ideas.
Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976. His hand-picked successor, Hua Guofeng, had the Gang of Four arrested. This
signaled the end of the Cultural Revolution.
After-effects of the Cultural Revolution
For the entire decade of the Cultural Revolution, schools in China did not operate; this left an entire generation with no
formal education. All of the educated and professional people had been targets for reeducation. Those that hadn't been
killed were dispersed across the countryside, toiling on farms or working in labor camps.
All sorts of antiquities and artifacts were taken from museums and private homes; they were destroyed as symbols of
"old thinking." Priceless historical and religious texts also were burned to ashes.
The exact number of people killed during the Cultural Revolution is unknown, but it was at least in the hundreds of
thousands, if not millions. Many of the victims of public humiliation committed suicide, as well. Members of ethnic and
religious minorities suffered disproportionately, including Tibetan Buddhists, Hui people and Mongolians.
Terrible mistakes and brutal violence mar the history of Communist China. The Cultural Revolution is among the worst of
these incidents, not only because of the horrific human suffering inflicted, but also because so many remnants of that
country's great and ancient culture were willfully destroyed.