Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
Iron-smelting in China during the Great Leap Forward (1958)

The Great Leap Forward is the name which was given to the Second Five-Year Plan adopted by the communist government of the People’s Republic of China in 1958 and running through to 1962. The Great Leap Forward was the idea of the Chairman of the Communist Party of China, Mao Zedong, and was part of his grand design to industrialize Chinese society and the Chinese economy in a very short period of time. Efforts to rapidly expand steel and grain production led to the adoption of policies which orchestrated a man-made famine in China, killing tens of millions of people in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Consequently, the Great Leap Forward is often also termed the Great Chinese Famine or Mao’s Great Famine. The Great Leap Forward also initiated a wave of mass migration within China as nearly twenty million workers were recruited and moved to industrial cities to provide labor as part of the planned economic changes. More broadly, this presaged the movement of hundreds of millions of Chinese people from rural areas to the new megacities since the last 1950s as the Chinese Economic Miracle occurred, the largest mass migration in human history.[1]

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Great Leap Forward chronology of events

The Chinese Communist Party emerged triumphant from the long-running Chinese Civil War in 1949 after the Chinese Nationalists or Kuomintang under their leader, Chiang Kai-shek, fled from the Chinese mainland to the island of Taiwan. Once the new regime had firmly established itself under its leader, Mao Zedong, the government began initiating five-year plans modeled on those which the Soviet Union had deployed from the late 1920s onwards to transform the country’s agricultural sector and dramatically increase the level of industrial activity in the country. The First Chinese Five-Year Plan ran from 1953 to 1957 and was hugely successful in terms of the overall increase in agricultural and industrial activity, although any assessment of it must bear in mind that the country was starting from a low base in the early 1950s after decades of economic destruction wrought by internal instability and war during the Chinese Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War, the latter an element of the wider Second World War.[2]

File:Mao Zedong 1959.jpg
Mao Zedong

The Great Leap Forward is in many ways an alternative name for the Second Five-Year Plan. It ran from 1958 to 1962. For this Chairman Mao set extremely ambitious targets. This was largely as a result of China’s growing divergence from the Soviet Union since the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. As part of the growing rivalry with Moscow, Mao declared that China would make striking gains through the Second Five-Year Plan, ones that would constitute a ‘Great Leap Forward’, particularly in the spheres of core economic productivity like grain and steel production. Efforts to do so would result in catastrophe for China’s people.[3]

The Great Leap Forward began in 1958 in a zealous manner. In fact, it was the zeal shown by communist officials in China which created a man-made famine by 1959. Firstly, too many agricultural workers were forced into industrial employment, depriving farms of the workers they needed. Then local party officials adopted some truly ignorant policies such as the melting down of farm machinery and utensils in order to be seen to be producing as much steel to meet and exceed their quotas as possible. Much of this was produced by Chinese agricultural workers who were kept away from the farms and instead told to focus on producing steel in backyard furnaces erected next to their dwellings. These often did not produce anything like functional steel, instead spitting out poor-quality pig iron.[4]

Backyard furnaces in 1958

By 1959 the results of this were being seen as agricultural yield declined considerably. Then to compound the problem the regime engaged in the requisitioning of what agricultural produce there was in the country and the prioritized it for the industrial workers in the cities and towns. This meant that the famine which ensued in 1959, 1960 and 1961 was paradoxically worst in rural areas where the food was being produced.[5] The appalling consequences of the Great Leap Forward, or what is often termed ‘Mao’s Great Famine’ today, were clear for all to see. Hundreds of millions of people were surviving in China on limited food supplies and tens of millions were seriously malnourished. Millions had succumbed to the famine and the brutal methods being used by local party officials to ensure compliance with the Orwellian strictures of the Second Five-Year Plan. Yet there was also a realization that things had gone drastically wrong and by late 1960 and into 1961, long before its scheduled end, the Great Leap Forward was being abandoned. By then tens of millions of Chinese men, women and children had died. The exact death toll is widely debated.[6]

Extent of migration associated with the Great Leap Forward

Hukou booklets

The migration associated with the Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962 was very sizeable in and of itself. An estimated 19 million rural workers were recruited in the course of 1958, 1959 and 1960 and were sent to the cities and towns to begin engaging in industrial work in the new planned factories. However, already by 1961 it was appreciated that too many workers had been recruited in this way for the planned factories and the policy was being reversed.[7] In the long run, perhaps the greater significance in terms of migration was that the hukou system of household registration was created in 1958 as part of the initiation of the Great Leap Forward. This classified workers across China into agricultural and non-agricultural workers. The system persevered for decades and has played a role in the mass migration that accompanied the Chinese Economic Miracle, broadly dateable between 1978 and 2012. Therefore, while the migration which occurred during the Great Leap Forward was very substantial in and of itself, the greater impact was on the longer term migratory flows in China.[8]

Demographic impact of the Great Leap Forward

The demographic impact of the Great Leap Forward was seen in several ways. Firstly, it led to the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese people. The exact figure is still disputed. Most scholars today are fully agreed that at least 30 million people died owing to the man-made famine and other elements of the draconian policies, while many tend to think that the figure was closer to 45 million, and perhaps as high as 60 million. It is very difficult to tell owing to efforts by the communist regime to disguise what happened. This led to the only period in the post-war era in which China’s population growth was largely static. The population tended to grow in China by between 15 and 20 million people per year during the second half of the twentieth century, but between 1959 and 1962 the population did not grow in this way.[9]

In the long term the famine associated with the Great Leap Forward probably ensured that China’s population is smaller today than it might otherwise have been. By the mid-1950s China’s population was growing by upwards of 15 million people per year. Had there not been the Great Leap Forward, China’s population might have been around 50 million higher by 1963 than it was and the compound growth effect of this over the rest of the 1960s and 1970s before the One-Child Policy was initiated in 1979 would have been very considerable indeed. It is speculative, but had it not been for the Great Leap Forward, China’s population might be higher today to the tune of several hundred million people.[10]

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References

  1. https://www.thecollector.com/mao-great-leap-forward-killed-millions/
  2. 丁 忱 and Ding Chen, ‘The Economic Development of China’, in Scientific American, Vol. 243, No. 3 (September, 1980), pp. 152–165.
  3. https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/chinas-great-leap-forward/
  4. https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/chinas-great-leap-forward/
  5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/
  6. Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (London, 2011).  
  7. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12320642/
  8. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-30/what-is-hukou-and-why-china-is-creating-mega-cities-quicktake
  9. Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (London, 2011).  
  10. https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPU_1202_0329--the-demography-of-china-s-1958-61-famine.htm


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