# Great Leap Forward The **Great Leap Forward** (1958–1962) was [[Mao Zedong]]'s campaign to collectivize agriculture and force rapid industrialization: vast people's communes, backyard steel furnaces and fabricated harvest figures. It produced the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–61, the deadliest famine in recorded history. Commonly cited estimates of the death toll run from about 15 million to more than 45 million. The main scholarly reconstructions cluster between roughly 23 and 45 million (see below). The campaign also set up the political struggle that became the [[Cultural Revolution]]. For the American right the Great Leap is the cautionary tale of utopian central planning that kills — invoked against ambitious state programs from the Green New Deal to industrial policy. It is the first of the two Mao-era catastrophes ([[Cultural Revolution]] being the second) that anchor the right's "Maoist" vocabulary, tracked in the [[Chinese History Hub]] alongside the ideology [[Maoism]]. ## What the campaign did Launched with the Second Five-Year Plan in 1958, the Leap aimed to overtake Britain's steel output within years. It did so by mass mobilization rather than investment. By the end of 1958 about 25,000 people's communes, averaging some 5,000 households each, had absorbed private plots and kitchens — [[Collectivization]] taken further than the Soviet model. Peasants were pulled from the fields to run backyard furnaces; of the 10.7 million tons of steel claimed for 1958, more than 3 million tons were unusable. The Four Pests campaign killed off sparrows, and locust swarms followed. The famine was driven by the [[Planned Economy]]'s information failure. Local cadres, under pressure to report miracles, inflated harvests. The state then procured grain against the false figures, leaving villages with nothing, while China remained a net grain exporter through 1958–60. In Xinyang prefecture, people starved at the doors of full state granaries, and the post office confiscated letters begging for help. ## The death toll Estimates differ by method (census reconstruction versus provincial archives) and by how "excess deaths" are defined: | Estimate | Source | |---|---| | ~23 million | Peng Xizhe (1987) | | ~27 million | Ansley Coale (1984) | | ~30 million | Judith Banister (1987); Basil Ashton et al. (1984) | | ~32.5 million | Cao Shuji (2005), county gazetteers | | ~36 million | Yang Jisheng, *Tombstone* (2008; English 2012) | | 45 million or more | Frank Dikötter, *Mao's Great Famine* (2010), Party archives | The Chinese Communist Party has never published a figure. Its 1981 *Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party* attributed the losses to "mistakes" of the Leap, natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split. Yang Jisheng notes that the split did not come until 1960, when the famine was already well under way. ## Lushan and Peng Dehuai At the Lushan Conference (July–August 1959), Defense Minister Marshal Peng Dehuai, who had seen starvation in his home province of Hunan, sent Mao a private letter criticizing the campaign. Mao treated it as a factional attack. Peng was dismissed, and an "Anti-Right Deviation" campaign purged millions of cadres. The purge silenced the officials who might have reported the famine just as it reached its worst, and the Leap was pushed forward for two more years. ## Retreat, and the road to the Cultural Revolution Mao had already handed the state chairmanship to Liu Shaoqi in April 1959. As the famine deepened, Liu and [[Deng Xiaoping]] reversed course: they shrank the communes, restored private plots and imported grain. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference (January–February 1962), Liu called the disaster "30% natural, 70% man-made," and Mao made a limited self-criticism. Mao read the retreat as revisionism and his own sidelining as a threat. In 1966 he launched the [[Cultural Revolution]] partly to destroy the men who had cleaned up after the Leap. Liu died in custody in 1969, and Peng, beaten by Red Guards, died in prison in 1974. ## See Also - [[Mao Zedong]] · [[Maoism]] · [[Chinese Communist Party]] · [[Deng Xiaoping]] - [[Cultural Revolution]] · [[Chinese Civil War]] · [[Chinese History Hub]] - [[Collectivization]] · [[Planned Economy]] · [[Holodomor]] · [[Dictators in World History Hub]]