What led to the Great Leap Forward?

The First Five Year Plan had created its own problems. Economic problems: how to advance industrialisation in the consumer goods industries and apply (non-Soviet) technology to do so, as well as using technology to create a more efficient agriculture, the biggest challenge of all. And, of course, how to pay for it.

Social problems existed too, notably what came to be known as the “three great differences”: between workers and peasants, between mental and manual work, and between town and countryside. The growing gap between town and countryside was the biggest issue for Mao, not just because the standard of living was better, in the main, in towns but because better educational opportunities and better health care existed there too.

But there was also the issue of inequality in the cities themselves with a growing bureaucratic class, a technocratic intelligentsia, and, amongst the proletariat, the skilled workers who tended to be older, who benefited from wage differentials and bonuses, and the unskilled workers and apprentices who tended to be younger. There was also a gap between permanent state workers who had more security and the temporary or contracted workers who had none and also lacked all but the barest minimum of social welfare benefits. There was unemployment and underemployment too.

Finally, there were political problems to address as well: an over-reliance on support from the Soviet Union, the growing bureaucracy, divorced from the people, a frustrated intelligentsia, and a frustration across the social strata with regard to the lack of democracy. All of this, as well as the ideological challenges, the second five-year plan would need to resolve. It was no small task.

A growing urban population has been a problem faced by all industrialising nations. The city sucks in rural populations hoping for work, there is not enough work to accommodate them all and too often, if the work is there, they are exploited. The result, as well as rising unemployment and underemployment, is horrendous social conditions as a majority are forced to live in overcrowded housing with desperately poor sanitary facilities, resulting in major health problems. So was the case in Britain, the world’s first industrialised nation, in the mid-nineteenth century; so were the conditions in China at the end of the First Five Year Plan, and in the mid-twentieth century China’s urban population had almost doubled from 57 million in 1949 to a billion by 1957.

The need to finance industrialisation, without exploiting the peasantry, was also becoming an urgent matter. Made more challenging in China than it had been in the Soviet Union by China’s lower start-up base. The Great Leap Forward planned to shift emphasis from capital-intensive to labour-intensive industries, from heavy industry to agriculture and consumer industries. It was referred to as ‘walking on two legs’, industry and agriculture developing side-by-side, heavy industry and light industry developing side-by-side too. Capital investment would continue because the development of heavy industries required it, but in the Great Leap Forward it wouldn’t do so at the expense of the other sectors of the economy.

‘Walking on two legs’ was to provide the answer. Light industry will provide inexpensive consumer goods for the peasantry, this would motivate the peasants to increase agricultural production, which, in turn, would stimulate the further development of light industry and would also finance heavy industry. The key to success was that the vast labour supply had to be made into an advantage, not a problem. It would be done by using labour-intensive methods in agriculture and light industry which would not require capital investment, so that investment could continue to be mostly directed towards heavy industry. This meant that light industry would be located in the countryside where it had the additional advantages of using local resources and of being able to utilise “slack” seasons when agriculture wasn’t so labour-intensive. It would also have the additional benefit of raising living standards in the more backward areas.

The reliance on the Soviet Union had become a problem too, and not just because of Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ and Mao’s strained personal relations with the Soviet Union’s leadership. Mao had long-voiced his concern that China was over-reliant on Soviet technology. Not only did it lead to economic and political dependency, but it also created a psychological dependency, dampening creativity and initiative. This much would have been received with wide agreement throughout the Party, however Mao’s response, to find the solutions without the need of scientists and technicians playing the leading role, seemed to most to be irrational. But though science had been declared “neutral” at the outset of the ‘Hundred Flowers’ campaign, Mao now felt it to be very political for he felt that a privileged technocratic elite had to be avoided. So, Mao called on the people themselves to learn through their experiences on the job and, with study, to become the technocrats of the future; not “experts” but “reds and experts”. Other concerns centred on the heavy hand of bureaucratic control and centralised planning, the ‘one-man management’ inherited from the Soviet Union. It was again, leading Mao to look, as he had done at Jiangxi and at Yan’an, to the people for an answer. Mao reflected on what the revolution in China had achieved, pointing out that at key points – at Jiangxi, throughout the Long March, at Yan’an, and beyond, the defeat of the Japanese and the Guomindang had been the result of a stronger will over superior numbers and resources: ‘first and foremost, things are determined by people’s hearts and minds’, he said. ‘It has always been like that in history.’[1]

Mao was moving towards the conclusion that industrialisation and equality with the Soviet Union and the West could be achieved by collective effort, an effort of national will, more than by science. He was also convinced it would cure the ills evident as a result of the First Five Year Plan: an out-of-control bureaucracy, social inequalities and the gulf between town and countryside. As Maurice Mesiner puts it: ‘The Maoist conclusion was that socialist ends could be attained only by socialist means’[2]

However, it would be “socialist means” the Chinese way or the Maoist way, for here, yet again, Mao’s conviction as a populist-voluntarist was asserting itself. His belief in the masses, and their ideas, their will, and their actions, over determinism and any objective forces that might be in play (like science). And in this great mass endeavour, people will find fulfilment far and above any material rewards they might gain.

China, he told the Central Committee in October, 1957, would achieve the highest crop yields in the world. It would increase its steel production four-fold (to 20 million tons annually) in just fifteen years. In a speech in November (actually delivered in Moscow when Mao was on his second, and last, visit) Mao talked of changing times: ‘At the moment I sense that the international situation has come to a turning point.… It is characterised by the East wind prevailing over the West wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism have become overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism….’[3] He boasted that China would surpass Britain in steel production in fifteen years (doubling the target that had only been raised the month previously) and saying that it would also surpass Britain in cement, coal, chemical fertiliser and machine tools.

But as Michael Lynch points out, Mao was creating a paradox: ‘China was to modernise without using modern methods. Not technology, but the physical exertion of the people …’[4]

[1] Quoted in Michael Lynch, Mao, p. 166

[2] Quoted in Maurice Maeisner, p. 191

[3] Quoted in Philip Short, p. 478

[4] Michael Lynch, Mao, p. 167