Great Leap Forward 1958-1962: Mao's Campaign and the Great Famine

The Great Leap Forward was a campaign launched by Mao Zedong in 1958 to transform China in a few years into an industrial power and a communist society. Peasants were organised into vast people’s communes, and millions were sent to make steel in backyard furnaces. The result was economic collapse and the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961, widely regarded as the deadliest famine in recorded history, with most estimates of excess deaths ranging from about 15 million to 55 million.

Background and launch

The Communist Party had ruled mainland China since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Following the Soviet model, the First Five-Year Plan of 1953–1957 built heavy industry with Soviet help, while farming was collectivised into cooperatives. Growth was real, but Mao believed it was too slow and too dependent on Soviet-style experts.

In November 1957, in Moscow, Mao declared that China would overtake Britain in steel production within fifteen years. At home, the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 had silenced many intellectuals and officials who might have warned against reckless targets. Mao argued that the enthusiasm of the masses could overcome shortages of capital and technology.

The Great Leap Forward was formally adopted at the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958, with the slogan “Go all out, aim high and achieve greater, faster, better and more economical results”. Targets for grain, steel and other goods were raised again and again, often by local officials eager to outdo one another.

Over the winter of 1957–1958, tens of millions of peasants had already been mobilised for irrigation and water-control projects. Some of these produced lasting reservoirs; many were badly planned and later damaged soils through waterlogging and salinisation.

People’s communes

In spring 1958 several agricultural cooperatives in Henan merged into a giant unit, and in August, after Mao praised the idea, the party leadership at Beidaihe called for communes everywhere. By the end of 1958 some 26,000 communes had absorbed almost all rural households, each averaging about 5,000 households.

The commune was meant to combine farming, industry, trade, education and militia. Private plots and livestock were often confiscated, and in many areas families were made to eat in communal canteens that at first served food freely. Peasants lost the incentive to work hard, and canteens consumed grain stocks rapidly.

Commune life was organised on military lines. Labour brigades marched to the fields with flags, nurseries and kindergartens were set up so that women could join full-time work, and propaganda promised that communism, a society of abundance, was only a few years away. In the first months, slogans encouraged people to eat as much as they wanted, and many canteens used up stocks meant to last far longer.

Steel and backyard furnaces

In August 1958 the leadership set a target of 10.7 million tonnes of steel for that year, double the output of 1957. To meet it, villages, schools, factories and offices built small backyard furnaces. Contemporary accounts and later studies suggest that around 90 million people were drawn into steel-making at its peak. Pots, pans, tools and even doors were thrown into the furnaces, and forests were cut for fuel.

The official target was declared met, but much of the metal was brittle pig iron of little use. Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1958 crops were left rotting in the fields because so many farmers were away making steel. Industrial output figures were inflated in the same way as harvests, and large state-run steel works were disrupted by the rush for quantity over quality.

Inflated harvests, Lushan and the famine

Under intense political pressure, local officials reported impossible harvests. Newspapers celebrated record yields, and Mao wondered aloud what China would do with its surplus grain. Pseudo-scientific techniques promoted by the leadership, such as very close planting and deep ploughing, reduced yields. The Four Pests campaign against sparrows and other pests, launched in 1958, contributed to insect damage to crops.

Because the state procured grain according to the inflated figures, it took far too much from the countryside. Grain exports, partly to repay debts to the Soviet Union, continued while people starved. By 1959 famine was spreading, and it was worst in 1960. Provinces such as Anhui, Sichuan, Gansu, Guizhou and Henan suffered most; in the Xinyang prefecture of Henan, starvation and violence by cadres killed huge numbers. There were cases of people eating bark and earth, and reports of cannibalism.

The suffering was made worse by the political system. Cadres searched homes for hidden grain and beat or starved peasants accused of hoarding. The household registration system and local controls made it hard for villagers to flee to cities or other provinces in search of food. Urban residents received rations, which kept city death rates much lower than rural ones.

Natural causes played some part. Drought and floods hit several regions, and the Soviet Union withdrew its technical experts in July 1960 during the Sino-Soviet split. But most historians agree that policy, not weather, was the main cause.

In July 1959, at a party conference at the mountain resort of Lushan, Defence Minister Peng Dehuai wrote Mao a private letter describing the waste and suffering caused by the Leap. Mao circulated the letter, denounced Peng as the leader of an “anti-party clique” and had him dismissed. A new campaign against “right opportunists” followed, and officials who reported shortages were punished.

The result was that the Leap was intensified rather than corrected during the winter of 1959–1960, turning shortages into mass famine.

Key people

• Mao Zedong – chairman of the Communist Party, who initiated and drove the campaign.
• Liu Shaoqi – Mao’s successor as state chairman from April 1959, who later admitted the disaster’s man-made causes.
• Peng Dehuai – defence minister purged after criticising the Leap at Lushan.
• Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun – leaders who organised the economic recovery after 1961.

Recovery and consequences

From late 1960 the leadership began retreating. Communes were broken into smaller production teams, canteens were closed, private plots restored and grain imported. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in January–February 1962, Liu Shaoqi described the disaster as caused three parts by nature and seven parts by human error. Mao made a limited self-criticism but resented the retreat.

The Communist Party’s official Resolution on History of 1981 acknowledged that the Great Leap Forward had caused serious losses to the country and its people, and placed the main responsibility on Mao and other leaders who had become overconfident after early successes. However, the famine itself is rarely discussed in Chinese public life, and books such as Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, based on years of research in party records, cannot be published on the mainland.

The famine left a demographic scar: deaths rose sharply and births fell, producing a missing generation. Mao’s authority was weakened, and his determination to regain control and to punish those he saw as “revisionists” helped lead to the Cultural Revolution of 1966.

By the numbers

Because China did not publish the scale of the disaster, scholars have reconstructed it from census data for 1953, 1964 and 1982, local records and party archives. The demographer Ansley Coale estimated about 27 million excess deaths, and Judith Banister about 30 million. Chinese researchers have also produced estimates, including Cao Shuji’s figure of about 32.5 million based on local gazetteers. Differences arise mainly from assumptions about normal death rates and from how lost births are treated, which is why published figures vary so widely.

Myths and facts

Myth: the famine was mainly caused by bad weather. Weather played a role, but the official explanation of “three years of natural disasters” is not supported by most research. Excessive procurement, false reporting and the suppression of criticism were the decisive causes.

Myth: the scale of the famine was unknown at the time. Many officials knew of mass deaths from local reports, and the leadership received warnings. The full extent was hidden from the public, and in China it remains a sensitive subject.

Timeline

• 1957, November: Mao announces China will overtake Britain in steel within fifteen years.
• 1958, May: The party formally adopts the Great Leap Forward.
• 1958, August: The Beidaihe meeting endorses people’s communes and doubles the steel target.
• 1959, April: Liu Shaoqi succeeds Mao as chairman of the People’s Republic.
• 1959, July–August: At Lushan, Peng Dehuai criticises the Leap and is purged.
• 1960, July: The Soviet Union withdraws its experts from China.
• 1960: The famine reaches its peak.
• 1962, January–February: The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference admits serious errors.

Why it matters

The Great Leap Forward caused one of the worst human disasters of the twentieth century. It showed how political pressure, false statistics and the silencing of critics could turn an economic campaign into mass death, and its consequences shaped Chinese politics, including the Cultural Revolution and the later turn to economic reform.