Great leap forward6/13/2023 ![]() Pictures taken at that time show him contorting his face like a mad man and running around in a coolie hat. "The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945-1957" by Frank Dikotter describes the Anti-Rightist period. "Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out" by Mo Yan (Arcade,2008) is narrated by a series of animals that witnessed the Land Reform Movement and Great Leap Forward. "Tombstone" by Yang Jisheng, a Xinhua reporter and Communist party member, is the first proper history of the Great Leap Forward and the famine of 19. See Separate Article GREAT FAMINE OF MAOIST-ERA CHINA: Books: "Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62" by Frank Dikotter (Walker & Co, 2010)is an excellent book. Crop yields also declined because Mao ordered farmers to grow crops using the dubious practices of close planting and deep plowing. People went hungry because they had melted down their agricultural tools and spent time in the backyard smelters rather than in the fields tending their crops. Villager stripped remaining forests for food and ate most of China’s birds. Entire mountainsides were denuded to provide wood for the smelters. Millions of pots and pans and tools was turned into useless slag. Mao's followers were expected to chant, "Long live the people's communes!" and "Strive to complete and surpass the production responsibility of 12 million tons of steel!"ĭuring the Great Leap Forward, farmers were encouraged to make steel instead of grow crops, peasants were forced onto unproductive communes and grain was exported at the time people were starving. Some scholars claim Mao was inspired by the factories he saw in the Soviet Union, and the Great Leap Forward was an attempt by Mao to overtake the Soviet Union so that he could establish himself as leader of the world Communist movement.Mao hoped to achieve this by redistributed labor from large industrial complexes to small backyard factories modeled after 8th century smelters, where peasants could melt down their cooking pots to make high-grade steel. One of Mao's goals during the Great Leap Forward was for China to surpass Britain in steel production in less than five years. In his book “The Great Famine “ Dikötter describes how Mao’s personal competitiveness with Khrushchev - made keener by China’s abject dependence on the Soviet Union for loans and expert guidance - and his obsession with developing a uniquely Chinese model of socialist modernity. The Great Leap Forward come about at a time when: 1) there were still great internal political and economic struggles in China, 2) the hierarchy of the Communist Party was changing, 3) China felt under siege following the Korean War and 4) the divisions of the Cold War in Asia were becoming defined. Many of these efforts failed due to poor planning. Among its goals were redistributing land into communes, modernizing agricultural system by building dams and irrigation networks and, most fatefully, industrializing rural areas. The Great Leap Forward began as part of one of Mao’s Five Year Plans to improve the economy. At least 15 million and possibly as many as 55 million people died in one of the deadliest famines in human history. The widespread famine and appeared even in fertile agricultural areas. ![]() These factors combined and bad weather caused the three successive crop failures in 1959, 19. Agriculture was neglected and the Chinese people were exhausted. Normal market mechanisms broke down and the goods that were produced were unusuable. In the end industrialization was pushed too fast, resulting in the overproduction of inferior goods and the deterioration of the industrial sector as a whole. One of the goals was the maximum use of the labor force by dramatically altering family life. Deviating from the Soviet model, giant cooperatives (communes) and “backyard factories” were created. The Great Leap Forward aimed at make China a major industrial power overnight rapidly raising industrial and agricultural production. As part of the "walking on two legs" initiative," Mao believed that "revolutionary zeal and cooperative effort would transform the Chinese landscape into a productive paradise." The same idea would be resurrected later by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Backyard furnaces In 1958 Mao inaugurated the Great Leap Forward, a disastrous attempt to rapidly industrialize, collectivize agriculture on an enormous scale and develop China though the construction of massive earthworks and irrigation projects.
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