One Slider On Mao’s Great
Leap Forward
By: Marin, Sean, Monica, Ryan
Thesis Rationale
• Thesis: The Great Leap Forward was an effort made by the Communist Party of
China under the leadership of Mao Zedong to transform China into a society
capable of competing with other industrialized nations within a short five-year
time period; yet, it had many down falls to it than positives: there were food
shortages, people forced to give up land, live in communes, and forge steel in
their back yards.
• Throughout the reign of Mao, he set up many programs to try to help benefit
China, but severely hurt the country by creating a famine that killed millions. He
would force people to live in crowded communes that were made up of land
from landlords. The people had to also make lots of steel in their backyard, but it
was too low of a quality to use.
• Classic examples are Mao and the CCP
“Ours is the only chemical factory
of its kind and the boiler is 70
years old. But one day a Party
official arrived and told me to
increase the pressure in the
boiler from a hundred to a
hundred and fifty pounds per
square inch so that the reactor
process could be completed 9
times a day instead of 6. The connection pipe burst
when the pressure reached 120 pounds and were
out of production for a week while repairs were made.”
Thesis: The Great Leap Forward was an
effort made by the Communist Party of
China under the leadership of Mao
Zedong to transform China into a
society capable of competing with
other industrialized nations within a
short five-year time period; yet, it had
many down falls to it than positives:
there were food shortages, people
forced to give up land, live in
communes, and forge steel in their back
yards.
“Sheer fatigue took its roll. Then peasants
all over China were told to plough below
the surface- the theory was that the soil
deep down would be fertile. But the
actual result was often to bury the topsoil
and bring worthless clay and sand to the
surface. The CCP also ordered that the
seeds be planed more closely.”
Key
• Photo in the top left corner: The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst anywhere, was the
Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, and to this day the ruling Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree
to which it was a direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the “Great Leap Forward”
that Mao Zedong launched in 1958. Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily
executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten;
sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and
forcing people to eat excrement. man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron
wire and a 10-kilogram stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up
a potato. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to
bury his son alive on the spot. There is no museum, no monument, no remembrance day to honor the tens of
millions of victims. Survivors, most of them in the countryside, are rarely given a voice, all too often taking their
memories with them to their graves.
• Photo in the bottom left corner: People were starved because they committed small crimes, like digging up
potatoes, Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the
spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that
“commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.” The disastrous famine that
overtook China’s millions was the direct result of blind political dogma backed by centralised control and
totalitarian power. Common sense was thrown out of the window, alongside any respect for humanity. ‘Revolution
is not a dinner party,’ Mao said, one of those many thoughts that filled the famous Little Red Book beloved by
radical students and trendy intellectuals in the West in the Sixties. But for vast numbers of the people he ruled,
dinner was a scraping of corn husks or the bark stripped from trees, and the only party was the one that ruthlessly
beat and tortured them into submission and condemned them to a cruel life and a terrible death.They were left, in
the words of a much older Chinese aphorism, to ‘eat bitterness’.
Key
• Political Cartoon Along Side Lower Left Hand Corner Photo: Mao and the CCP made this poster to create the
illusion that working together, and sacrificing everything while relying on china, that is portrayed as the dragon, will
benefit the individual. Quite the opposite happened, the landlords were forced and publicly humiliated to give up
the land, and since food was so scares many turned to stealing, but there was many harsh punishments that came
along with that, like being buried alive, or being physically hurt. This resulted into most of the population resorting
to cannibalism. At the end 45 to 60 million people died from the starvations, and the brutality of the communistic
government.
• Photo top right: Mao saw grain and steel production as the key pillars of economic development. He forecast that
within 15 years of the start of the Great Leap, China's steel production would surpass that of the UK. In the August
1958 Politburo meetings, it was decided that steel production would be set to double within the year, most of the
increase coming through backyard steel With no personal knowledge of metallurgy, Mao encouraged the
establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood. The unit was
claimed to be manufacturing high quality steel. Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made
to produce steel out of scrap metal. Although the output consisted of low quality lumps of pig iron which was of
negligible economic worth, Mao had a deep distrust of intellectuals who could have pointed this out, and placed
his faith in the power of the mass mobilization of the peasants. Moreover, the experience of the intellectual classes
following the Hundred Flowers Campaign silenced those aware of the folly of such a plan. According to his private
doctor, Li Zhisui, Mao and his entourage visited traditional steel works in Manchuria in January 1959 where he
found out that high quality steel could only be produced in large-scale factories using reliable fuel such as coal.
However, he decided not to order a halt to the backyard steel furnaces so as not to dampen the revolutionary
enthusiasm of the masses. The program was only quietly abandoned much later in that year
Key
• Political Cartoon Middle Right Hand Side: This poster is based on an ancient Chinese fable, “Ba Xian Guo Hai”
which means The Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea. This fable talks about eight Gods that uses their own abilities to
cross the ocean. The Communist Party wanted people that can use their abilities to makes China develop faster and
stronger to help them compete with other countries such as Japan. In a communistic society everyone gave up
everything and worked different jobs for the same salary, so people believe everyone is an equal part or
contribution to the uprising of China.
• Political Cartoon Lower Right Hand Corner: This poster portrays an individual holding a plate with a plentiful
amount of food atop it. This was to show to China that there are many beneficial things that could come from the
Great Leap Forward. Now, this is ironic because the exact opposite thing happened during the Great Leap Forward,
due to a major famine that killed up to 60 million people. This Cartoon also persuaded the Chinese that if one
works hard, many rewards come out of the hard work and determination. This was also not true because all of the
thousands of peasants worked diligently to make the steel to help the infrastructure of China. Since it was not of a
high enough quality, China could not use it. Although, Mao did not cancel the plan to make the steel, but slowly
faded it away, making all the steel useless. In return the peasants did not help their own country.
• Peasant quote top left hand corner: The seventy year old boiler shows that China did not care to improve
technology or machinery. This causes a lack in production and a lack of safety for the peasants and workers.
Peasants often had to work with their hands instead of machinery. There was no industrial revolution in China
because Mao believed that if the population is big everyone can work by hand. The party official did not respect
the peasant’s response saying it is too old to handle the amount of pressure, causing the explosion of a pipe.
Key
• Mao Quote Lower right hand corner: The ignorance of the CCP caused more destruction in China. The once fertile
soil is now clay and sand because the fertile soil was over turned and is ruined. Now the Chinese are having a
greater famine because they destroyed the little soil they had. In 1959 only 170 million tons of grain was produced,
which was significantly lower than the 260 million tons China produced the year before. In 1960 China only
produced 144 million tons. The famine caused 14,000,000 deaths, and was a widespread catastrophe. Mao cannot
put the needs of the people below the needs for the county to become a major power. Mao even said that it was
right to kill half of the Chinese if the other half got a surplus of food. This shows that Mao’s plan to industrialize
during the Great Leap Forward has done nothing but failed because it has only caused more and more devastation
to china.
• Photo in the middle: These are backyard blast furnaces which were used in peasant’s backyards to make steel.
Mao enforced peasants to make their own steel because he did not have the tools to manufacture steel on a big
scale. This caused famine because peasants stopped farming to make steel, so there was no one to look over the
crops. The steel was not even worth making because usually it was unusable or poor in quality. Mao wanted to
industrialize China by using the population, but little does he know that population is just a number if you don’t
have to right tools to manufacture goods.