By monopolizing agriculture, the government was able to buy grain cheaply and sell it for a much higher price in order to finance industrialization. Mao believed existing collectives should be merged into even larger People's Communes.
By the end of , approximately 25, state-operated communes were created, with an average of 5, households each. In a way, the people's communes constituted a fundamental attack on the institution of the family, especially in a few model areas where radical experiments in communal living-- large dormitories in place of the traditional nuclear family housing-- occurred. These were quickly dropped. The system also was based on the assumption that it would release additional manpower for such major projects as irrigation works and hydroelectric dams, which were seen as integral parts of the plan for the simultaneous development of industry and agriculture.
The Great Leap Forward was an economic failure. In early , amid signs of rising popular restiveness, the CCP admitted that the favorable production report for had been exaggerated. Among the Great Leap Forward's economic consequences were a shortage of food in which natural disasters also played a part ; shortages of raw materials for industry; overproduction of poor-quality goods; deterioration of industrial plants through mismanagement; and exhaustion and demoralization of the peasantry and of the intellectuals, not to mention the party and government cadres at all levels.
Throughout efforts to modify the administration of the communes got under way; these were intended partly to restore some material incentives to the production brigades and teams, partly to decentralize control, and partly to house families that had been reunited as household units.
Political consequences were not inconsiderable. In April Mao, who bore the chief responsibility for the Great Leap Forward fiasco, stepped down from his position as chairman of the People's Republic.
The attack was led by Minister of National Defense Peng Dehuai, who had become troubled by the potentially adverse effect Mao's policies would have on the modernization of the armed forces.
Peng argued that "putting politics in command" was no substitute for economic laws and realistic economic policy; unnamed party leaders were also admonished for trying to "jump into communism in one step.
Peng was replaced by Lin Biao, a radical and opportunist Maoist. The new defense minister initiated a systematic purge of Peng's supporters from the military.
In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. The "back-yard furnaces," which produced high-cost iron of low quality, seem to have had a similar purpose: to teach citizens how to produce iron for armaments in case of war and enemy occupation, when only guerrilla resistance would be possible.
The Soviet model called for, among other things, a socialist economy in which production and growth would be guided by five-year plans. The state would purchase grain from the farmers at low prices and sell it, both at home and on the export market, at high prices. Mao actually believed that collective action was sufficient to propel an agrarian society into industrial modernity.
According to his master plan, surpluses generated by vigorously productive labor in the countryside would support industry and subsidize food in the cities. Mao also launched the program to kill the "four pests" sparrows, rats, insects and flies and improve agricultural productive through "close planting. At one point, he declared war on four common pests: flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows" Mishra wrote.
Provincial recordkeepers chalked up impressive body counts: Shanghai alone accounted for 48, The campaign backfired by breaking the delicate balance between humans and the environment. The rush to build factories, communes and communal dining halls into models of miraculous Communist plenty began to falter as waste, inefficiency and misplaced fervor dragged down production.
By , food shortages began to grip the countryside, magnified by the amount of grain that peasants were forced to hand over to the state to feed swelling cities, and starvation spread. Officials who voiced doubts were purged, creating an atmosphere of fearful conformism that ensured the policies continued until mounting catastrophe finally forced Mao to abandon them.
Peasants were forced to work intolerable hours to meet impossible grain quotas, often employing disastrous agricultural methods inspired by the quack Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko. The grain that was produced was shipped to the cities, and even exported abroad, with no allowances made to feed the peasants adequately.
Starving peasants were prevented from fleeing their districts to find food. Cannibalism, including parents eating their own children, became commonplace. Its basic object is the gradual realization of the industrialization of our state. Industrialization has been the goal sought by the Chinese people during the past one hundred years.
From the last days of the Manchu dynasty to the early years of the republic some people had undertaken the establishment of a few factories in the country.
But industry as a whole has never been developed in China. It was through the implementation of the policies of the industrialization of the state and the collectivization of agriculture that the Soviet Union succeeded in building up, from an economic structure complicated with five component economies, a unified socialist economy; in turning a backward agricultural nation into a first.
Soviet experiences in the realization of industrialization are of great value to us. The foundation of socialism is large industrial development. If we do not possess factories of great size, if we do not possess a large industrial structure with the most advanced equipment, then we shall generally not be able to talk of socialism, much less in the case of an agricultural country.
Industry must first be developed to provide possibilities for the collectivization and mechanization of agriculture, for the socialist reform of agriculture.
At the same time, only with industrialization of the state may we guarantee our economic independence and nonreliance on imperialism.
But some of our comrades are tottering along like a woman with bound feet always complaining that others are going too fast. They imagine that by picking on trifles grumbling unnecessarily, worrying continuously, and putting up countless taboos and commandments, they will guide the socialist mass movement in the rural areas along sound lines. No, this is not the right way at all; it is wrong. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, 2nd ed. Soon it will sweep the whole country.
This is a huge socialist revolutionary movement, which involves a rural population more than five hundred million strong, one that has very great world significance. We should guide this movement vigorously warmly, and systematically, and not act as a drag on it. As a result, many peasants are still having difficulties or are not well off.
The well-off ones are comparatively few, although since land reform the standard of living of the peasants as a whole has improved. For all these reasons there is an active desire among most peasants to take the socialist road. Such teams contain only the rudiments of socialism.
Each one draws in a few households, though some have ten or more. These steps are designed to raise steadily the socialist consciousness of the peasants through their personal experience, to change their mode of life step by step, and so minimize any feeling that their mode of life is being changed all of a sudden.
Many of the Communist Party leaders wanted to proceed slowly with cooperativization. Mao, however, had his own view of developments in the countryside.
A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation. But the true dimensions of what happened are only now coming to light thanks to the meticulous reports the party itself compiled during the famine.
Li Zhisu wrote. All able-bodied men, the farmers of China, had been taken away to tend backyard steel furnaces. But the logic was: Why spend millions building modern steel plants when steel could be produced for almost nothing in courtyards and fields. Furnaces dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see. Li Zhisui, excerpts reprinted U. News and World Report, October 10, ]. The rice was planted so closely together that electric fans had to be set up around the fields to circulate air and prevent the plants from rotting.
The kitchens took on a sinister aspect because of a nonsensical plan to boost steel production by melting down everything from hoes and plows to the family wok and meat cleaver.
At first, people gorged themselves, but when food became scarce, the kitchens controlled who lived and who died: The staff of the communal kitchens held the ladles, and therefore enjoyed the greatest power in distributing food. They could dredge a richer stew from the bottom of a pot or merely skim a few vegetable slices from the thin broth near the surface. By early , people were dying in huge numbers and many officials were urgently recommending that the communes be disbanded.
The opposition went up to the very top, with one of the most famous Communist military leaders, Peng Dehuai, leading the opposition. Officials launched campaigns to dig up grain that peasants were allegedly hiding. Where iron ore was unavailable, they melted any steel objects they could get their hands on, including pots and pans, and even bicycles, to make steel girders, but these girders were useless, as the steel was impure and of poor quality and thus cracked easily.
Unbeknownst to the Communist Party officials, the result was not steel, but high carbon pig iron , which needs to be decarburized to make steel. The results varied from region to region. In regions where the steelmaking tradition had survived unbroken, where the old skills of the ironmasters had not been forgotten, the pig iron was indeed further refined into steel, and the steel production actually did increase.
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