The Great Leap Forward

Category: History
Key figures: Mao Zedong (initiator), Zhou Enlai (administrator), Peng Dehuai (critic), Liu Shaoqi (State Chairman), Deng Xiaoping (later reformer), Lin Biao (Peng’s successor as Defense Minister), Chen Yun (economist)

Summary

The Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) was an economic and social campaign launched by Mao Zedong to rapidly transform China from an agrarian society into an industrial superpower, abandoning the Soviet model of gradual collectivization in favor of aggressive, utopian targets. Intended to accelerate socialist development and surpass Britain’s industrial output within fifteen years, the campaign instead precipitated one of the deadliest famines in human history, killing an estimated 15–45 million people (with scholarly consensus suggesting approximately 30 million deaths) through a combination of disastrous agricultural policies, inflated grain requisitions, forced industrialization that diverted labor from farming, and ecological destruction. The Great Leap Forward represented Mao’s belief that revolutionary will and mass mobilization could overcome material constraints; it reflected deep ideological conflicts between Maoist voluntarism and more pragmatic economic management, conflicts that would continue throughout the People’s Republic and contributed directly to the later Cultural Revolution. The campaign’s catastrophic failure discredited Maoist economic theory, enabled pragmatists like Deng Xiaoping to implement market-oriented reforms after Mao’s death in 1976, and remains in contemporary China a historical watershed marking the boundary between revolutionary idealism and modernizing pragmatism.

Origins and Ideological Impetus

After the founding of the People’s Republic in October 1949, China adopted a Soviet-style centrally planned economy based on heavy industrialization and agricultural collectivization. The First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957), modeled on Stalin’s approach, achieved modest industrial growth but created tensions between agricultural requisition demands and peasant welfare. In 1956, two events shifted the political landscape: Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU (February 25, 1956) denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, and the Hungarian Revolution (October–November 1956). Mao interpreted Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization as ideological retreat and determined that China would prove the superior socialist model. He was also influenced by Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko’s claims—then standard in Soviet science but scientifically fraudulent—that deep plowing and close planting dramatically increased crop yields.

Through a series of party conferences in early 1958—including the Nanning Conference (January 1958) and the Chengdu Conference (March 1958)—Mao pressed for radically accelerated development, and in May 1958 the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress formally adopted the general line of the Great Leap Forward. The campaign embraced several distinctive features:

• (1) The People’s Communes: merging agricultural collectives with light industry and militia into massive super-collectives of 20,000–50,000+ people
• (2) Backyard Steel Furnaces: local steel production using primitive kilns, even at the cost of withdrawing peasants from agriculture
• (3) Unprecedented Collectivization: elimination of private plots and enforcement of communal living arrangements including communal kitchens and dormitories
• (4) Inflated Production Targets: steel output targets were doubled from 5.35 million tons to 10.7 million tons within a single year; grain targets were set at 375 million tons for 1958, more than double the actual 1957 harvest of approximately 185 million tons

Mao promised to overtake Britain’s steel production within fifteen years and achieve material abundance that would render money and commodity exchange obsolete. Soviet premier Khrushchev privately dismissed the plan as “harebrained,” contributing to the Sino-Soviet split that formalized in 1960.

The Communes and Organizational Restructuring

The People’s Communes represented an unprecedented degree of collectivization. Beginning in spring and accelerating through summer 1958, the government merged the lower-level agricultural collectives into massive communes. By September 1958, approximately 90% of China’s rural population—some 500 million people—had been incorporated into roughly 26,000 communes. These communes were intended to be not merely agricultural collectives but total social organisms: they controlled production, established communal kitchens, directed labor allocation, organized militia, and ran small-scale industries.

Private plots, which had been permitted under earlier collectivization, were largely eliminated, denying peasants the ability to grow food for their own consumption or barter in local markets. Peasant-owned livestock were requisitioned into commune herds. The disruption was immediate and severe. Communal kitchens initially encouraged wasteful eating—peasants, uncertain about future supplies, ate as much as possible when food was available—exhausting grain reserves that would have carried communities through the following winter.

Women were mobilized into factory work and communal labor on a scale unprecedented in Chinese history. The militarized organization of communes—modeled on the People’s Liberation Army—introduced quasi-military discipline into agricultural production, with cadres issuing orders for planting, harvest timing, and crop variety that overrode peasants’ accumulated local knowledge of their own soils and micro-climates.

The Backyard Steel Campaign

Launched with enormous fanfare in August 1958, the backyard steel furnace campaign tasked every commune and work unit with local steel production. Peasants and workers built primitive blast furnaces—often just piles of brick and clay requiring no technical sophistication—and attempted to smelt steel using inadequate fuel and raw materials. To meet quotas, peasants melted down their own farm tools, cooking implements, and household metal objects. Forests were stripped for fuel, contributing to long-lasting ecological damage. By year’s end, approximately 90 million people had been mobilized for steel production.

The output was overwhelmingly unusable pig iron that crumbled rather than formed workable steel. Of the approximately 10.7 million tons of “steel” reported produced in 1958 (matching the target), post-campaign analysis revealed that perhaps half was too brittle to use. The diversion of peasant labor from agriculture during the critical harvest season was catastrophic: an estimated 30–40% of grain crops in 1958 were left to rot in the fields for lack of hands to harvest them.

Agricultural Collapse and Famine

The foundation of the Great Leap Forward’s catastrophe was the collision between inflated grain-production claims and actual agricultural decline. Party cadres faced enormous pressure to report inflated harvests to meet targets. Fearing punishment for failure, cadres engaged in systematic false reporting.

The statistical fabrication was staggering. In Henan Province, some communes reported harvests of 15,000–30,000 jin per mu (Chinese acre), compared to historical averages of 200–400 jin per mu. A famous photograph from Anhui Province showed a small child sitting atop a squash, with the caption claiming yields had become so prodigious that a single squash could support a child. These inflated estimates were not isolated anomalies but a systematic pattern: Mao’s official announcement in August 1958 claimed China had harvested 375 million tons of grain—approximately double the actual figure.

Based on falsely inflated estimates, the state extracted grain from communes at percentages often exceeding 50–70% of the actual harvest, leaving peasants with catastrophically inadequate food. Peasants were forbidden from consuming their own production or selling grain on markets; black-market grain trading was treated as a crime. Grain continued to be exported to the Soviet Union to service debts—approximately 2.7 million tons in 1959 and 2.7 million tons in 1960—even as rural China starved.

The famine hit hardest in provinces where inflated reporting was most extreme. Anhui Province lost approximately 3–6 million people, more than 15% of its population in some counties. Sichuan Province, China’s most populous, lost 9–13 million people according to some estimates, including roughly one-seventh of its rural population. Gansu and Qinghai provinces in the northwest experienced mortality rates exceeding 10% of the population. In some communes in Gansu, the death rates reached 30–50% within a single year. Henan Province had engaged in some of the most extreme false reporting and suffered correspondingly severe famine, with documented cases of peasants dying of starvation while commune granaries held untouched reserves.

Mortality rates resulted from outright starvation, malnutrition-related illnesses (edema, dysentery, tuberculosis), and disease. Cannibalism was documented in Anhui, Sichuan, and other provinces. The human toll remains disputed, with estimates ranging from 15 million (conservative official Chinese position) to 55 million (Mao’s biographer Jung Chang’s upper-bound estimate), with scholarly consensus centering around 30 million—a figure larger than the total death toll of World War I and approximately equivalent to three times the Holocaust.

Key demographic studies include:

• Peng Xizhe (1987): approximately 23 million excess deaths
• Judith Banister (1987): approximately 30 million excess deaths
• Basil Ashton et al. (1984): approximately 30 million excess deaths
• Frank Dikötter (2010): at least 45 million deaths, arguing many official archives understate mortality

The Lushan Conference and Political Crisis

As the famine became undeniable, criticism emerged within the Communist Party leadership. Marshal Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), the Defense Minister and a veteran of the Long March, visited his native Hunan Province in June 1959 and documented catastrophic conditions firsthand. At the Lushan Conference (July 2 – August 1, 1959), convened at the hill resort on Mount Lu in Jiangxi Province, Peng submitted a private letter to Mao Zedong on July 14, 1959, respectfully but directly questioning the Great Leap’s policies and noting the gap between propaganda and reality.

Mao responded by circulating the letter to the conference participants as an “anti-party” document and demanded that delegates choose between himself and Peng. Under intense pressure, the conference voted to condemn Peng’s “right opportunist clique.” Peng was removed from all his posts. He was replaced as Defense Minister by Lin Biao (1907–1971), who would become Mao’s designated successor before his mysterious death in a plane crash over Mongolia in 1971 following an alleged coup attempt. The purge of Peng sent a clear signal: even senior military heroes could not safely dissent from Mao’s policies. This emboldened Mao and hardened the campaign despite mounting evidence of disaster. Following the Lushan Conference, rather than scaling back, Mao launched a second wave of the Great Leap Forward, intensifying grain requisitions in 1959–1960 during the peak famine period.

Peng Dehuai spent the rest of his life under house arrest, was tortured during the Cultural Revolution, and died in 1974 without formal rehabilitation. He was posthumously rehabilitated in December 1978, two months after the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress launched Deng Xiaoping’s reform program.

The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference (January 1962)

By 1961, Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969), the State Chairman and Mao’s nominal second-in-command, conducted an investigative tour of rural Hunan Province and personally witnessed the famine’s devastation. He reportedly told peasants: “The death of so many people is a disgrace. History will record the role that you, Liu Shaoqi, and I played in this disaster.” In January 1962, Mao convened the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference (qiansangren dahui), the largest party gathering since the 1949 revolution, bringing together approximately 7,000 senior officials to assess the Great Leap Forward’s failures.

At this conference, Liu Shaoqi delivered a cautious but unprecedented public critique of the Great Leap, famously saying that the famine was “30% due to natural causes, 70% due to human error”—implicitly attributing the disaster to policy failures rather than bad weather. Deng Xiaoping supported Liu’s cautious critique. Mao was present but largely silent, sensing his authority was under indirect challenge. The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference marked the beginning of Mao’s political isolation within the party leadership, a situation he would address violently through the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which explicitly targeted Liu Shaoqi (who died in custody in 1969) and Deng Xiaoping (who was purged twice and survived).

Gradual Retrenchment and Retreat (1961–1962)

Beginning in 1961, Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi began cautiously advocating retrenchment: restoring production brigades as the primary accounting unit, allowing peasants to retain private plots, permitting limited market trading, reducing state grain requisitions, and closing backyard steel furnaces to return workers to agriculture. Mao stepped back from day-to-day administration but retained ultimate political authority and continued to resist the admission of systematic policy failure.

From 1961–1962, the government gradually loosened controls. Private plots were restored. Markets were permitted to reopen. Grain requisitions were reduced. Backyard furnaces were mostly abandoned. These limited reforms—hardly radical by later standards—allowed agriculture to recover and the immediate famine to end by 1962. Annual grain output, which had fallen from approximately 200 million tons in 1958 to 143 million tons in 1960, recovered to approximately 170 million tons by 1962 and exceeded 200 million tons again by 1965.

Legacy and Historical Significance

The Great Leap Forward stands as one of the deadliest policy-driven disasters in human history, comparable to the Soviet collectivization famines of the 1930s—in which 5–8 million died—and exceeding the Bengal famine of 1943 in which 2–3 million perished. It marked a watershed in China’s historical trajectory: the campaign demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of ideological rigidity unchecked by empirical reality, of mobilizing vast populations through compulsion and propaganda, and of suppressing internal criticism in the name of revolutionary unity.

The Great Leap Forward’s failure proved decisive in China’s long-term development. Its collapse created space for pragmatists like Deng Xiaoping to prevail after Mao’s death in September 1976. Deng’s post-1978 economic reforms—the Household Responsibility System that returned agricultural decision-making to individual families, the dismantling of communes completed by 1984, the reintroduction of markets, the embrace of Special Economic Zones and foreign investment—explicitly rejected the utopian mobilization model of the Great Leap Forward in favor of market-socialist mechanisms.

The Chinese Communist Party’s official historical judgment, announced in the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China” (June 1981), characterized the Great Leap Forward as “70% wrong, 30% right” (qi san kai), acknowledging its devastating failure while attempting to preserve some credit for Mao’s overall revolutionary leadership.

In contemporary China, the Great Leap Forward remains among the most sensitive historical topics. Official historiography emphasizes the campaign’s good intentions and the role of natural disasters (droughts and floods did affect some regions in 1959–1961, though they were not the primary cause of famine) while official death-toll figures remain substantially lower than scholarly estimates. Chinese scholars who have attempted to document the full scale of the famine—notably Yang Jisheng (b. 1940), whose oral-history work Tombstone (Mubei, 2008) was banned in mainland China—have faced professional marginalization or worse. Outside China, the Great Leap Forward is recognized as a supreme example of how concentrated political power, ideological extremism, and suppression of dissent can produce catastrophe at a scale matched by few other historical events.

Related

• Mao Zedong — the paramount leader who initiated and defended the Great Leap Forward despite its catastrophic consequences.
• The Cultural Revolution — the subsequent upheaval launched by Mao partly in reaction against the pragmatic revisionism that followed the Great Leap’s failure.
• Economic Reform & Opening-up — Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms explicitly rejected the Great Leap Forward’s centralized model.
• Deng Xiaoping — the reformer whose pragmatic policies reversed the Great Leap’s collectivization and enabled recovery after Mao’s death.
• Zhou Enlai — the administrator who, while constrained by Mao’s political dominance, advocated for pragmatic measures to mitigate the campaign’s damage.
• The Communist Party of China — the political organization through which the Great Leap Forward’s policies were implemented and later reassessed.
• Zheng He — an earlier episode where China possessed enormous capability and then chose to withdraw, offering a structural parallel to the Great Leap’s inward turn.
• The Hukou System — the household-registration controls that confined the rural population in place and helped make the famine’s scale possible.
• Agriculture and Land Reform — the collectivization drive whose people’s communes the Great Leap radicalized, and the post-Mao decollectivization that reversed it.

Sources

• Jasper Becker. Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine. Simon & Schuster, 1998. Detailed historical account with eyewitness testimony; estimates approximately 30 million deaths.
• Frank Dikötter. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. Walker Publishing, 2010. Comprehensive scholarly treatment based on Chinese provincial archives; argues for 45 million deaths.
• Yang Jisheng. Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Investigative account by a former Xinhua journalist combining archival research and oral history; banned in mainland China.
• Judith Banister. China’s Changing Population. Stanford University Press, 1987. Demographic analysis estimating approximately 30 million excess deaths.
• Peng Xizhe. “Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces.” Population and Development Review 13.4 (1987): 639–670. Provincial-level demographic analysis estimating approximately 23 million excess deaths.
• Roderick MacFarquhar. The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 2: The Great Leap Forward, 1958–1960. Columbia University Press, 1983. Detailed political history of the campaign.
• CCP Central Committee Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China (June 1981). Official party assessment characterizing the Great Leap as “70% wrong, 30% right.”