The Great Leap Forward
China’s leaders had
felt obliged by Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to confront the issue of
what, absent claims to a Party Chairman’s godlike infallibility,
constituted Communist political legitimacy. In the months following
the February 1956 speech, they seemed to feel their way toward
making their own governance more transparent, presumably to avoid
the need for periodic shocks of rectification. Worshipful
references to Mao Zedong were deleted from the Communist Party
constitution. The Party adopted resolutions cautioning against
“rash advance” in the economic field and suggesting that the main
phase of “class struggle” would now draw to a close.1
But such a prosaic
approach quickly clashed with Mao’s vision of continuous
revolution. Within months Mao proposed an alternative route to
political rectification: the Chinese Communist Party would invite
debate and criticism of its methods and open up China’s
intellectual and artistic life to let “one hundred flowers bloom
and one hundred schools of thought contend.” Mao’s exact motives in
issuing this call remain a subject of debate. The Hundred Flowers
Campaign has been explained as either a sincere call for the Party
to cut through its bureaucratic isolation to hear directly from the
people or a stratagem to coax enemies into identifying themselves.
Whatever the motive, popular criticism quickly moved beyond
suggestions for tactical adjustments into criticisms of the
Communist system. Students set up a “democracy wall” in Beijing.
Critics protested the abuses of local officials and the privations
imposed by Soviet-style economic policies; some contrasted the
first decade of Communist rule unfavorably with the Nationalist era
that preceded it.2
Whatever the original
intention, Mao never brooked a challenge to his authority for long.
He executed a sharp about-face and justified it as an aspect of his
dialectic approach. The Hundred Flowers movement was transformed
into an “Anti-Rightist Campaign” to deal with those who had
misunderstood the limits of the earlier invitation to debate. A
massive purge led to the imprisonment, reeducation, or internal
exile of thousands of intellectuals. At the end of the process, Mao
stood again as China’s unchallenged leader, having cleared the
field of his critics. He used his preeminence to accelerate the
continuous revolution, turning it into the Great Leap
Forward.
The 1957 Moscow
conference of socialist parties had found Mao issuing a fateful
claim about Chinese economic development. Responding to
Khrushchev’s prediction that the Soviet Union would surpass the
United States economically in fifteen years, Mao delivered an
impromptu speech proclaiming that China would surpass Great Britain
in steel production in the same interval.3
This comment soon
acquired the status of a directive. The fifteen-year steel
target—subsequently reduced, in a series of largely extemporaneous
remarks, to three years4—was matched by a
series of similarly ambitious agricultural goals. Mao was preparing
to launch China’s continuous revolution into a more active phase
and to confront the Chinese people with its most stupendous
challenge yet.
Like many of Mao’s
undertakings, the Great Leap Forward combined aspects of economic
policy, ideological exaltation, and foreign policy. For Mao, these
were not distinct fields of endeavor but interrelated strands of
the grand project of the Chinese revolution.5
In its most literal
sense, the Great Leap Forward was designed to carry out Mao’s
sweeping ideas of industrial and agricultural development. Much of
China’s remaining private property and individual incentives were
eliminated as the country was reorganized into “people’s communes”
pooling possessions, food, and labor. Peasants were conscripted in
quasi-military brigades for massive public works projects, many
improvised.
These projects had
international as well as domestic implications—especially with
respect to the conflict with Moscow. If successful, the Great Leap
Forward would rebut Moscow’s prescriptions of gradualism and
effectively relocate the ideological center of the Communist world
to China. When Khrushchev visited Beijing in 1958, Mao insisted
that China would achieve full Communism before the Soviet Union
did, while the Soviet Union had opted for a slower, more
bureaucratic, and less inspirational route of development. To
Soviet ears, this was a shocking ideological heresy.
But for once, Mao had
set a challenge so far outside the realm of objective reality that
even the Chinese people fell short of its achievement. The Great
Leap Forward’s production goals were exorbitant, and the prospect
of dissent or failure was so terrifying that local cadres took to
falsifying their output figures and reporting inflated totals to
Beijing. Taking these reports literally, Beijing continued to
export grain to the Soviet Union in exchange for heavy industry and
weaponry. Compounding the disaster was that Mao’s steel targets had
been implemented so literally as to encourage the melting down of
useful implements as scrap to fulfill the quotas. Yet, in the end,
the laws of nature and economics could not be abrogated, and the
Great Leap Forward’s reckoning was brutal. From 1959 to 1962, China
experienced one of the worst famines in human history, leading to
the deaths of over twenty million people.6 Mao had again called
on the Chinese people to move mountains, but this time the
mountains had not moved.