The Great Leap Forward: Mao's First Failure

Under the rule of Mao Zedong, the People’s Republic of China was faring fairly well. The day to day lives of many Chinese citizens “gradually improved in the years following 1949” (Mao Zedong). However, Mao became impatient and unsatisfied with the progress being made, and began to devise a plan known as the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s version of industrialization, focusing on the gathering of capital to create steel, and agriculture to produce food. However, China did not have the capital required to produce steel mills, so Mao instructed regular citizens to make kilns of mud and clay in their backyard, for steel production. 

Mao also recognized the necessity of food in the industrialization of China, and subsequently created agricultural communes to facilitate crop growth. They would include free health care, education, food and housing, in return for work on the one community farm. This was the epitome of the socialist ideal, especially because it entailed a complete lack of private property. The Great Leap Forward worked remarkably well for a few years, but Mao once again became impatient.

Mao believed in “voluntarism over structuralism,” or the power of simple human force over structural or physical limitations, such as the lack of steel mills or spatial constraints on the farms. Because of this, Mao ignored the protests of scientists and economists dissenting the sustainability of the industrializing process, writing them off as “capitalists or reactionaries.” He moved towards a more unscientific method, making farmers plant up to four times the original amount of seeds per acre in the farms, which proved detrimental to crop growth. Through various other non-scientific practices, Mao not only reversed the advances made by the Great Leap Forward, but threw post-war China into a state of economic disarray. The pseudo-kilns produced unusable metals, and their wasn’t nearly enough food to feed everybody. Somewhere around 20 million people starved to death as a result of the Great Leap Forward. 

After the Great Leap Forward, the more moderate members of the party took action. The radicals within the party remained ignorant of the Leap’s failure, continually praising the positive accomplishments it achieved. The moderates, however, essentially stripped Mao of almost all of his power. Later, the Cultural Revolution would restore a measure of authority to Mao, but the Great Leap Forward indisputably marked the beginning of the decline of Mao’s leadership.