China's Great Leap Forward

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For the record, this is a summary of Mao's economic policies.

In order to change Chinese feudal society towards Communist social
order,  which is understood by Communists as a necessary goal of human
development, Mao  developed specific methods out of Leninist concepts
which renedered special characteristics to Chinese Communism, its
strengths and shortcomings.  These methods, above all the system of
organized mass movements, stress the change of social consciousness,
i.e. the creation of new men for a new society, as the basis for
changing reality, i.e. the mode of production.  The concept of the mass
politics, relevant in Chinese political thought from ancient time, plays
a role as important as that of the elite cadre corps within the Party.
The mass movement as an instrument of political communication from above
to  below is peculiar to Chinese Communist organization.  This
phenomenon is of utmost
importance in understanding the nature and dynamics of the governmental
structure of the Communists Party of China (CPC).  The theoretical
foundation of mass movement as a means of mediation between the will of
the leaders and the people presupposes that nothing is impossible for
the masses, quantitatively understood as a collective subject, if their
power is concentrated by a Party of correct thought and action.  This
concept comes out of Mao's romantic faith in the
great strength the masses are capable of developing in the interest of
their own well-being.  So the "will of the masses" has to be articulated
by the  masses and within the masses.  This the CPC calls the "mass
line". Mao's mass line theory requires that the leadership elite be
close to the
people, that it is continuously informed about the people's will and
that it transforms this will into concrete actions by the masses.

>From the masses - back to the masses!  This means: take the scattered
and unorganized ideas of the masses and, through study, turn them into
focused  and systemic programs, then go back to the masses and propagate
and explain  these ideals until the masses embrace them as their own.
Thus mass movements are initiated at the highest level, announced to
Party cadres at central and regional work conferences, subject to cadre
criticism and modified, after which starts the first phase of mass
movement.  Mass organizations are held to provoke the "people's will",
through readers' letters to newspapers and rallies at which these
letters are read and debated.  The results are then officially discussed
by the staff of leading organs of the state and the Party, after
which the systematized "people's will" is clarified into acts of law or
resolutions, and then the mass movement spreads to the whole nation.

Until the Cultural Revolution, the history of Chinese politics is a
history of mass movements. Mass movements successfully implemented Land
Reform 1950-53; Marriage Reform 1950-52; Collectivization 1953 - the
General Line of Socialist Transformation (from national bourgeois
democratic revolution to proletarian socialist revolution);
Nationalization 1955 (from private ownership of industrial  means of
production into state ownership).  The method against opposition was
thought reform through "brain washing" (without the derogatory
connotation), which  is a principle of preferring to change the
consciousness of political opponents instead
of physically liquidating them. The Hundred Flower Movement, 1957 was
launched on February by Mao with his  famous 4-hour speech; "On the
Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People"  before 1,800
leading cadres.  In it, Mao distinguished "contradiction between the
enemy
and ourselves" from "contradiction among the people" which should not be
resolved by a dictatorship, i.e. physical force, but by open discussion
with criticism and counter criticism.
Up until 1957, the mass movement policies of Mao achieved spectacular
success.

Land reform was completed, the struggle for women's emancipation was
progressing well, and collectivization and nationalization was leading
the nation into socialism.  Health services were a model of socialist
construction in both cities and the countryside.  The Party's
revolutionary leadership was accepted by enthusiastically society. By
1958, agriculture production almost doubled from 1949 (108 million tons
to 185 million tons), coal production quadrupled to 123 million tons,
steel  production grew from 0.1 million tons to 5.3 million tons.

The only problem came from bourgeois intellectual rebellion. On May 25,
1957 Mao expressed his anxiety at a session of the Standing  Committee
of the Politburo, and gave his approval to those who warned against too
much bourgeois liberty. That afternoon, Mao said at a Conference of
Communists Youth League cadres  that "all words and deeds which deviate
from socialism are basically wrong". At the opening session of the
Peoples Congress on June 26, Zhou Enlai
initiated the "counter criticism" against the critics. Mao's call for
open criticism was serious and genuine, but the discussion  he had
conceived of as a safety-valve reached a degree of intensity he had not
anticipated.  Mao over-estimated the stability of the political climate.

Against this background, the CPC stood at the crossroad of choosing the
Soviet model of development or an independent path. Economy development
was based on three elements:
1) Build up heavy industry at the expense of agriculture.
2) The establishment of an extensive system of individual incentives by
mean of which productive forces could be developed from a conviction
that the  superiority of socialist modes of production would be
vindicated by visible rise in living standards,
3) The acceleration of the socialist transformation of society in order
to create the precondition required by the CPC for establishing a
socialist order.

Two paths were opened to the CPC leadership in 1958:
1) a phase of consolidation
2) pushing forward toward permanent revolution.

Mao was forced by geopolitical conditions (withdrawal of Soviet aid and
US embargo) to overcome the lack of capital through mobilization of
China's vast labor reservoir.  The strategy was to connect political
campaigns to production campaigns.

Under pressure from orthodox Leninists within the Party apparatus, with
the failure of the "Hundred Flower Movement", Mao concluded it was
impossible to create a socialist consciousness through a gradual
improvement of material living conditions; that consciousness and
reality had to be changed concurrently and in conjunction through
gigantic new efforts at mobilization. This led to the Anti-Rightist
Campaign 1957-58 followed by "Three Red  Banner" in
Spring 1958 initiating simultaneous development of industry and
agriculture through the use of both modern and traditional methods of
production under the "General Line of Building Socialism".  It was to be
implemented through a labor intensive development policy by a "Great
Leap Forward" and by establishing a comprehensive collectivization by
establishing "People's Communes".

The GLP was not as senseless as some suggest.  It called for the new
system of "Two Decentralizations, Three Centralizations, One
Responsibility." By this it was meant the decentralized use of labor and
local investment, central control over political decisions, planning and
administration of natural investment capital and one responsibility
meant every basic unit to account for itself to its supervising unit.
The GLP was successful in many areas.  The one area that failed
attracted the most attention.  It was the area of backyard steel furnace
production.
The technological requirement of steel making, unlike hydro-electricity,
did not lend itself to labor intensive mass movements.  Yet steel was
the symbol of industrialization and a heroic attempt had to be made to
overcome the lack of capital.  The attempt failed conspicuously, but its
damage to the economy was overrated.

The real test however, was in the People's Commune.  Favorable weather
conditions produced high yields in 1958 in the experimental communes.
This led to a rush nationwide to follow suit, even though almost
everywhere the fundamental preconditions for successful operation were
absent.  Most did not have adequate administrative offices, nurseries,
canteens, old peoples homes, hospitals, etc. In other places, the local
leadership took the transition to communism at
face value and severed all connection with supervising organs in the
name of the withering away of the state.  Disorder grew into chaos
within months.

During the Wuhan Party Plenum, December 1958, Marshal Peng Dehuai
criticized the
over-extended commune program which led to the Plenum initiating a
readjustment of
the "Three Red Banner" policy.  Conccurrently the Central Committee
approved "the wish of Comrade Mao Zedong not to stand again as a
candidate for the Chairmanship of the PRC after the end of his term in
office".

Liu Shaoqi was elected as head of state by the second People's Congress
on April 27, 1959 and became heir apparent after Mao in the Party.

In the fateful Lushan conference July 2-August 16 1959, Marshal Peng
shifted his criticism from policy to the person of the leader. On July
23, Mao in an emphatic speech, rejected the reproach of his critics and
declared that the "Great Leap Forward" and the People's Commune had
brought about more advantages than disadvantages. Mao threatened an open
split:
"If we deserve to perish I shall go away, I shall go to the countryside
and lead the peasants to overthrow the government.  If you of the PLA
will not follow me, the I shall find a Red Army.  But I believe that the
PLA will follow me."

On August 16, 1959, Peng and his followers were condemned as an "anti
Party clique" by a resolution passed by the Eighth Plenum. On September
17, Peng was dismissed as Defense Minister.

In late 1959, several natural disasters and bad weather condition were
reported in
the press.  Floods and drought brought about the "three bitter years" of
1959-1962.  After 1962, the economy recovered, but the politic was
shifting  toward a struggle against revisionism which brought on the
Cultural Revolution four years later.

While Mao was the leader of the CPC, leadership was and still is based
on mass support.  The Chairmanship of the CPC before 1979 was similar to
the  position of Pope in the Catholic Church, powerful in moral
authority but highly circumscribed in operational power. The GLF was the
product of mass movement, not that of a single person.  Mao's leadership
was toward the organization of the Party and it policy formulation
procedures, not the dictation of particular programs. To describe Mao as
a dictator merely reflects an ignorance of the CPC power structure.  The
failures of the GLF and the People's Commune were caused more by
implementation flaws rather than conceptual error.  Bad luck and US
embargo had also something to do with it.

These programs resulted in much suffering, but the claim by some that 30
million people were murdered by Mao with evil intent does not hold up to
serious examination.

Did the Chinese revolution attempt to break a 150 year long cycle of
poverty and famine under Western imperialism; and did it fail, succeed,
or partially succeed? If something like 4-5% of China's population was
dying every 20-30 years from famine, were desperate measures (which
might include an all out industrial drive) to break the cycle
desirable?  Was it likely (not necessarily inevitable) that given the
scale of the task, that there would be great failures along the way?
Did the ending of the cycle of famine after the GLF failures in any way
suggest some level of success with China's development program?  This
last question should would, I think, have to look at the entire history
of the revolution with mean figures for growth figures and various
health indices over its 50 years.

Is it true, as Vicento Navarro of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene
and Public Health  argues, that China's success from the outset of the
revolution until the beginning of the Deng reforms in introducing health
and hygiene measures resulted in it having saved millions of lives?
This can be seen when we compare China to a comparable nation in terms
of poverty and development at the outset of the Chinese revolution, such
as India.
For example, China's infant mortality rates equaled India's in 1960, but
by 1983 were only a third of India's, despite massive Ford Foundation
help for India.  Life expectancy was also similar in these two nations
in 1960, but by 1970 China's people lived on average 10 years longer.
This margin widened over the 1970s and 1980s.  This was all done while
their per capita incomes remained similar.  Does this suggest the
situation is more complex than an evil dictator at work possessed by bad
ideology with Mao and China?

Some scholars in China hold the view that the Cultural Revolution laid
the strucutral foundation for the success of economic reform of the Deng
era, just as the New Deal laid the foundation for the mergence of the
military-industrial complex in the US.

There would have been no deaths in the 1961-62 famines if not for the US
embargo.

Reports of severe natural disasters in isolated places and of bad
weather conditions in larger areas appeared in the Chinese press in the
Spring of  1959, after the Wuhan Plenum in December 1958 already made
policy adjustments  based on the technical criticism of Peng Dehuai on
the Peoples Communes initiative. In March, 1959, the entire Hunan region
was under flood and soon after that the spring harvest in South-west
China was lost through drought.  The 1958 grain production yielded 250
million tons instead the projected 375 million tons,  and
1.2 million tons of peanuts instead of the projected 4 million tons. In
1959, the harvest came to 175 million tons. In 1960, the situation
deteriated further. Damaged by drought  and other bad weather affected
55% of the cukltivated area. Some 60% of the agricultural land in the
North received no rain at all.  The yield for 1960 was 142 million tons.
In 1961, the weather situation improved only slightly. In 1963, the
Chinese press called the famine of 1961-62 the most severe since 1879.
In 1961, a  food storage program oblidged China to import 6.2 million
tons of grain from Canada and Australia. In 1962, import decreased to
5.32 million tons.  Between  1961 to 1965 China imported a total of 30
million tons of grain at a cost of US$2 billion. (Robert Price,
'International  Trade of Communist China' Vol II, pp 600-1). More would
have imported except US pressure of Canada and Austrailia to  limit
sales to China and US interference with shipping prevented China from
importing more.
Canada and Australia were both anxious to provide unlimited credit to
China for grain purchase, but alas, US policy prevailed and millions
starved in China.

University of Wisconsin's Maurice Meisner, who many consider to be the
dean of post WW II Chinese scholarship, presents three related ways of
looking at the 20-30 million deaths caused by the Great Famine begun in
the late 1950s under Mao's tenure in his THE DENG XIAOPING ERA AND
INQUIRY INTO THE FATE OF CHINESE SOCIALISM 1978-1994 (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1996).  One, it was a horrible miscalculation.  Two, it
was the end of famines on this scale (literally, that had been occurring
for the last few centuries off and on in China about every generation or
so). In other words, it brought this horrible historical pattern to an
end.
Or, three, it was both.  Both a horrible miscalculation, while also
afterwards bringing this pattern of famine every generation of so to an
end, thus, perhaps, saving millions.

One could, for example see the US war on Vietnam as a more direct attack
on people with intent to kill, than Mao's policy and the famine
coincidental to it.

Henry C.K. Liu