The Great Leap Forward

Podcast Transcript

In 1958, the People’s Republic of China instituted its second five-year plan since the revolution.

Its goal was to rapidly modernize China and boost agricultural and industrial output to levels comparable to the Western world.

China was going to become a modern country, not through the widespread adoption of machinery, but through the mass mobilization of labor.

It didn’t work.

Not only didn’t it work, but it was one of the greatest failures in world history.

Learn more about the Great Leap Forward, what it was, and why it failed so miserably on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The Great Leap Forward represents one of the most tragic episodes in not only Chinese history but world history. It was a disaster on a par with the world wars fought in the 20th century.

Despite the massive loss of life that resulted from the Great Leap Forward, it hasn’t received the same level of attention.

To understand why the Great Leap Forward happened, we need to step back to China in the 1950s. Mao Zedong and the Communist Party had successfully unified China after a lengthy civil war and were eager to transform their largely agricultural nation into a modern industrial power.

The Great Leap Forward emerged from several converging factors.

First, Mao was deeply influenced by Soviet industrial success but wanted to surpass it using distinctly Chinese methods. He believed that human willpower and revolutionary enthusiasm could overcome any material constraints…a philosophy that would prove catastrophically wrong.

Second, there was genuine pressure to modernize quickly, as China felt vulnerable surrounded by more industrialized nations.

The campaign officially launched in 1958 with impossibly ambitious goals: steel production was supposed to double in a single year and to be on a par with the United Kingdom in 15 years. Agricultural output was expected to increase dramatically through new farming techniques and sheer determination.

Having goals is fine, but the real question was how China was going to actually do this?

Mao’s plan was not to industrialize like every other country on Earth that industrialized. He was going to do it in what he considered a unique Chinese way. He was going to throw millions of people at the problem and massively deurbanize Chinese society.

He believed in the power of collective effort and mass enthusiasm and felt that it would be enough to propel the campaign. Mao emphasized communal living, political indoctrination, and collective work rather than expert-driven planning.

Of course, there was no economic basis for any of this. It had never been done before, and it had never even been tried. Moreover, even from a Marxist perspective, Mao’s ideas wouldn’t work.

Marx developed a theory where societies went through stages. He claimed that industrial societies had to go through a capitalist stage before arriving at true communism. Mao thought he could bypass everything and go directly to communism via rural peasantry, not industrial workers.

He also just assumed that everyone would just try really hard, and that would be sufficient.

One of the first things he did was to move millions of people from cities to the countryside to live in collective farms. This reverse urbanization was unprecedented in modern history.

Urban workers, students, and even bureaucrats were sent to the countryside to provide “voluntary” labor, often under pressure or state coercion. The idea was to treat agriculture with the same seriousness as industrial production, and to scale up rural infrastructure through sheer manpower.

This was the first of many major problems during the Great Leap Forward.

Industries in urban centers were often left short-handed as skilled workers were relocated. Simultaneously, the agricultural sector did not benefit significantly because these urban laborers often lacked farming experience.

Mao assumed that people were fungible assets, but they aren’t. Everyone has unique skills that have been developed over time. You can’t take a factory worker and a farmer, have them switch places, and expect them to perform the same.

The mass migration of people from urban to rural areas wasn’t the only major mistake.

One of the most famous ones had to do with how Mao planned to increase steel production.

If you know anything about steel production, you are probably aware that steel is produced in large factories. Mao was going to achieve his grand steel production goals through millions of backyard steel furnaces.

Mao’s logic was incredibly simplistic. Lots of steel furnaces would mean lots of steel.

The problem was that these small-scale furnaces were horribly inefficient. Getting resources to a few large steel factories is much easier than sending them to millions of small furnaces.

Moreover, there was a huge issue of quality. Almost no one who made backyard steel was any good at it, and what they produced was of such low quality that it couldn’t be used for anything.

However, it was worse than being inefficient and low quality. Mao demanded high production quotas. To meet these unreasonable quotas, people began melting whatever steel products they had. This included everything from pots and pans to farm tools.

Not only were farmers destroying tools needed for farming, but they were also spending enormous amounts of time on this useless steel production program instead of farming.

Another program that was part of the Great Leap Forward was the Four Pests campaign.

The Four Pests Campaign was a public health and hygiene campaign designed to eliminate four specific pests believed to spread disease and damage crops: mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. In particular, the Eurasian Tree Sparrow.

Mosquitos, flies, and rats probably all make sense in that they can spread disease. However, why sparrows?

Sparrows, like many birds, eat grain, so, according to Mao’s logic, they were to be eradicated to help agricultural production.

People banged pots, pans, and drums to scare sparrows into constant flight, eventually causing them to die from exhaustion. Nests were destroyed, eggs smashed, and chicks killed. Schools, workers, and military units competed to see who could kill the most birds.

Well, the anti-sparrow program worked, and the sparrow population plummeted.

But it turned out that sparrows eat more than grain. They also eat insects. In particular, locusts. Without sparrows, locust plagues devastated the countryside and destroyed agricultural production in some areas.

There was even more insanity.

The Chinese Communist Party promoted what can best be described as pseudoscientific agricultural techniques. They felt that communist theory could dictate what would work in farming.

This was not far from Lysenkoism, which was practiced in the Soviet Union, which I covered in a previous episode.

One of the techniques they pushed was close planting. Mao and his agricultural advisors believed that crops of the same species were “friendly” and would thrive when grown tightly together, in extremely dense configurations.

In fact, overcrowding caused crops to compete for sunlight, water, and nutrients, stunting their growth or killing them outright. Instead of boosting yields, this led to dramatically lower productivity.

They also promoted deep planting. It was claimed that plowing the soil 4–6 feet deep, or about 1 to 2 meters, would allow roots to grow deeper, improve aeration, and increase access to nutrients.

In reality, deep plowing damaged soil structure, destroyed beneficial microorganisms, and exposed nutrient-poor subsoil, degrading the fertility of the land. It also required far more labor and time, with little to no benefit. In some areas, flooding and erosion followed.

Cadres were encouraged to dig up and relocate fertile soil from other locations, often hillsides or riverbanks, to improve crop yields in poorer fields. This was incredibly time consuming and also led to more erosion without any increase in production.

Absent chemical fertilizers, human excrement and animal remains were used, which ended up spreading disease.

Traditional agricultural practices that had sustained Chinese farming for centuries were declared “feudal” or “reactionary” and were discarded. Peasants were forced to comply with nonsense techniques, even when they knew better.

Despite all of these things that were working to decrease agricultural production, quotas were increased. Given the circumstances, it resulted in exactly what you’d expect. People just lied about production.

Wet grains were often weighed rather than dry grains. Local officials would create demonstration plots of land to show higher-ups how successful they were, even though everything else was falling apart.

At every level of the government hierarchy, there was an incentive to lie and to accept all of the lies of the people below you. By the time the information got to the top, they just assumed that everything was going according to plan.

Despite the lies, grain still had to be delivered, which meant taking whatever they had to try to back up their claims. All of this grain was used to feed the people who remained in the cities.

By 1959, all of these things I’ve mentioned, as well as many more, combined to create a massive famine.

The misallocation of labor, the improper agricultural techniques, the destruction of farm equipment to make steel quotas, the locust swarms, and the export of everything that was grown to appease high-ranking officials left no food in most rural areas.

What followed was the greatest famine in world history.

In villages across the country, starvation led to the complete breakdown of social norms and human dignity. Families were reduced to eating tree bark, roots, grass, mud, and even the earth itself. The bark of trees was stripped bare. Starving children searched animal burrows for scraps.

Villagers boiled leather shoes and belts to extract nutrients from the hide. People began to die in their homes, in fields, on roadsides, bodies sometimes left unburied because entire households had perished.

Cannibalism was documented in numerous eyewitness accounts and provincial records that were later uncovered. In some areas, corpses were consumed; in the worst cases, there were reports of people being killed for food.

Despite the scale of the catastrophe, the Chinese state continued to deny the existence of famine, at least publicly. Mao Zedong was largely shielded from the worst reports, and when confronted with evidence, he often blamed “natural disasters” or local officials for “sabotage.”

The central leadership was also reluctant to reverse course, as doing so would mean admitting that the policies of the Great Leap Forward had failed.

Eventually, in 1961 and 1962, the Chinese Communist Party began quietly reversing its policies. Communal kitchens were dismantled, private plots were once again allowed, and quotas were reduced. Leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping pushed through pragmatic reforms that slowly alleviated the famine

Outside of China, the rest of the world had little idea what was happening. Foreigners weren’t allowed outside of cities, so they couldn’t see for themselves what was happening.

The first clue of what was going on came in 1961 and 1962, when there was a surge of refugees into Hong Kong who recounted stories of hunger, death, and repression in rural provinces.

It was not until the mid to late 1970s and especially the 1980s, after Mao’s death and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, that scholars gained significant access to Chinese archives and demographic data.

The demographic catastrophe became undeniable once researchers like Judith Banister, a U.S. demographer, analyzed official Chinese statistics in the early 1980s. Her 1987 estimate that roughly 30 million people died of starvation or related causes shocked the academic world and has since become one of the most widely cited figures.

Other estimates have placed the number of dead as high as 55 million.

This is far greater than the number of people killed in the First World War, and the higher estimates approach the number killed in the Second World War.

Many famines in history have been caused by human activity, more often than not, war. The Great Leap Forward was responsible for the greatest famine in history. It was also almost totally preventable.

A host of almost laughable economic and technical errors, and the inability of anyone to speak truth to power out of a fear of reprisal, resulted in one of the greatest disasters the world has ever seen.