When was chinas great leap forward

The geographical size of a commune varied but most contained about families. People in a commune gave up their ownership of tools, animals etc so that everything was owned by the commune. People now worked for the commune and not for themselves. The life of an individual was controlled by the commune. Schools and nurseries were provided by the communes so that all adults could work. The commune provided all that was needed — including entertainment.

Soldiers worked alongside people. The population in a commune was sub-divided. Twelve families formed a work team. Twelve work terms formed a brigade. Each sub-division was given specific work to do. Party members oversaw the work of a commune to ensure that decisions followed the correct party line. By the end of , million people had been placed into 26, communes. The speed with which this was achieved was astounding. Apply market research to generate audience insights.

Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. The Great Leap Forward was a five-year plan of forced agricultural collectivization and rural industrialization that was instituted by the Chinese Communist Party in , which resulted in a sharp contraction in the Chinese economy and between 30 to 45 million deaths by starvation, execution, torture, forced labor, and suicide out of desperation.

It was the largest single, non-wartime campaign of mass killing in human history. He devised the plan after touring China and concluding that he felt the Chinese people were capable of anything. Overall, the plan was centered around two primary goals, collectivizing agriculture, and widespread industrialization, with two main targets, increasing grain and steel production.

Private plot farming was abolished and rural farmers were forced to work on collective farms where all production, resource allocation, and food distribution was centrally controlled by the Communist Party.

Large-scale irrigation projects, with little input from trained engineers, were initiated, and experimental, unproven new agricultural techniques were quickly introduced around the country.

These innovations resulted in declining crop yields from failed experiments and improperly constructed water projects. A nationwide campaign to exterminate sparrows, which Mao believed incorrectly were a major pest on grain crops, resulted in massive locust swarms in the absence of natural predation by the sparrows.

Grain production fell sharply, and hundreds of thousands died from forced labor and exposure to the elements on irrigation construction projects and communal farming. Famine quickly set in across the countryside, resulting in millions more deaths. People resorted to eating tree bark and dirt, and in some areas to cannibalism. Farmers who failed to meet grain quotas, tried to get more food, or attempted to escape were tortured and killed along with their family members via beating, public mutilation, being buried alive, scalding with boiling water, and other methods.

Large-scale state projects to increase industrial production were introduced in urban areas, and backyard steel furnaces were built on farms and in urban neighborhoods.

The backyard steel industry produced largely useless, low-quality pig iron. Existing metal equipment, tools, and household goods were confiscated and melted down to fuel additional production. Due to the failures in planning and coordination, and resulting materials shortages, which are common to central economic planning , the massive increase in industrial investment and reallocation of resources resulted in no corresponding increase in manufacturing output.

Most were the able-bodied male workers, breaking up families and leaving the forced agricultural labor force for the collective farms consisting of mostly women, children, and the elderly. The increase in urban populations placed additional strain on the food distribution system and demand on collective farms to increase grain production for urban consumption. The end goal of collectivization was abolishment of private ownership, or Communism, with its anticipated shared prosperity.

Collectivization proceeded in stages, first with perhaps ten families voluntarily cooperating in mutual aid teams MAT. In this early stage of socialism, each family agreed to share their labor, tools, and draft animals with other team members while retaining ownership—a relationship that had historically existed within farming communities but was now formalized by contract.

Five teams or fifty households comprised an APC, and each contributed their resources, including land, to the cooperative. Families retained title to their parcel of land and were compensated based on their contributions of land and labor.

As these moderate steps toward collectivization proved effective, by late Mao moved to the next—and more controversial—phase by combining approximately five low-level cooperatives into higher-level cooperatives, encompassing some households each. Private property was abolished as land; animals, tools, or other resources became property of the cooperative; and labor became the sole criterion for compensation.

The first Five Year Plan yielded impressive results. More important, life expectancy was twenty years longer in than when the Communists took power in Impressive industrial output statistics notwithstanding, quantity took precedence over quality, and quota requirements often resulted in shoddy final products.

Also, rural people resisted private property confiscation. In early , as the first Five Year Plan reached high tide, the party, flush with success, invited comments from Chinese intellectuals and the public in a directive known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, a metaphor equating contending ideas with blooming flowers. Initially hesitant to speak out, first scientists and then literary figures, students, and common people voiced criticisms of party policies.

Then, inspired by the criticisms of Stalin, Hungarians revolted against the Soviet Union in October Moscow brutally suppressed the rebellion, and when his compatriots began public attacks against him, Mao reverted to Soviet tactics. In response, local cadres felt compelled to identify which 5 percent within their ranks were rightists. In addition to removing the most educated from society, the Anti-Rightist Campaign discouraged the Chinese people from voicing any doubts or criticisms and left them amenable to even the most irrational and misguided policies, including the absurd notion that economic development required only ideological correctness, not scientific or technical expertise.

In this final stage of collectivization, communes formed—each with some 5, house- holds, more than twenty times larger than previous cooperatives. Communes would be self-sufficient in agriculture, industry, governance, education, and health care. The commune would guarantee to each individual a set income, regardless of labor contributions, but in the spirit of wild optimism that prevailed at the time, most rural Chinese threw themselves wholeheartedly into the Great Leap.

Kitchens allowed a designated chef to feed the entire commune from huge pots, which were sometimes located in the fields to avoid wasted travel time. However, this plan backfired in a tragic fashion. As a result of the exaggerations, party officials carried off most of the food to serve as the cities' share of the harvest, leaving the farmers with nothing to eat. People in the countryside began to starve. The next year, the Yellow River flooded, killing 2 million people either by drowning or by starvation after crop failures.

In , a widespread drought added to the nation's misery. In the end, through a combination of disastrous economic policy and adverse weather conditions, an estimated 20 to 48 million people died in China. Most of the victims starved to death in the countryside. The official death toll from the Great Leap Forward is "only" 14 million, but the majority of scholars agree that this is a substantial underestimate.

The Great Leap Forward was supposed to be a five-year plan, but it was called off after just three tragic years. The period between and is known as the "Three Bitter Years" in China. It had political repercussions for Mao Zedong as well. As the originator of the disaster, he ended up being sidelined from power until , when he called for the Cultural Revolution.

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