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China The Great Leap Forward, 1958-60
Before the end of the First Five-Year Plan, the growing
imbalance between industrial and agricultural growth,
dissatisfaction with inefficiency, and lack of flexibility in the
decision-making process convinced the nation's leaders--
particularly Mao Zedong--that the highly centralized,
industry-biased Soviet model was not appropriate for China. In 1957
the government adopted measures to shift a great deal of the
authority for economic decision making to the provincial-level,
county, and local administrations. In 1958 the Second Five-Year
Plan (1958-62), which was intended to continue the policies of the
first plan, was abandoned. In its place the leadership adopted an
approach that relied on spontaneous heroic efforts by the entire
population to produce a dramatic "great leap" in production for all
sectors of the economy at once
(see The Great Leap Forward, 1958- 60
, ch. 1;
Rural Society
, ch. 3;
The 1950s
, ch. 6). Further
reorganization of agriculture was regarded as the key to the
endeavor to leap suddenly to a higher stage of productivity. A
fundamental problem was the lack of sufficient capital to invest
heavily in both industry and agriculture at the same time. To
overcome this problem, the leadership decided to attempt to create
capital in the agricultural sector by building vast irrigation and
water control works employing huge teams of farmers whose labor was
not being fully utilized. Surplus rural labor also was to be
employed to support the industrial sector by setting up thousands
of small-scale, low-technology, "backyard" industrial projects in
farm units, which would produce machinery required for agricultural
development and components for urban industries. Mobilization of
surplus rural labor and further improvements in agricultural
efficiency were to be accomplished by a "leap" to the final stage
of agricultural collectivization--the formation of people's
communes.
People's communes were created by combining some 20 or 30
advanced producers' cooperatives of 20,000 to 30,000 members on
average, although membership varied from as few as 6,000 to over
40,000 in some cases. When first instituted, the communes were
envisaged as combining in one body the functions of the lowest
level of local government and the highest level of organization in
agricultural production. Communes consisted of three organizational
levels: the central commune administration; the production brigade
(roughly equivalent to the advanced producers' cooperatives, or a
traditional rural village), and the production team, which
generally consisted of around thirty families.
At the inception of the Great Leap Forward, the communes were
intended to acquire all ownership rights over the productive assets
of their subordinate units and to take over most of the planning
and decision making for farm activities. Ideally, communes were to
improve efficiency by moving farm families into dormitories,
feeding them in communal mess halls, and moving whole teams of
laborers from task to task. In practice, this ideal, extremely
centralized form of commune was not instituted in most areas.
Ninety-eight percent of the farm population was organized into
communes between April and September of 1958. Very soon it became
evident that in most cases the communes were too unwieldy to carry
out successfully all the managerial and administrative functions
that were assigned to them. In 1959 and 1960, most production
decisions reverted to the brigade and team levels, and eventually
most governmental responsibilities were returned to county and
township administrations. Nonetheless, the commune system was
retained and continued to be the basic form of organization in the
agricultural sector until the early 1980s.
During the Great Leap Forward, the industrial sector also was
expected to discover and use slack labor and productive capacity to
increase output beyond the levels previously considered feasible.
Political zeal was to be the motive force, and to "put politics in
command" enterprising party branches took over the direction of
many factories. In addition, central planning was relegated to a
minor role in favor of spontaneous, politically inspired production
decisions from individual units.
The result of the Great Leap Forward was a severe economic
crisis. In 1958 industrial output did in fact "leap" by 55 percent,
and the agricultural sector gathered in a good harvest. In 1959,
1960, and 1961, however, adverse weather conditions, improperly
constructed water control projects, and other misallocations of
resources that had occurred during the overly centralized
communization movement resulted in disastrous declines in
agricultural output. In 1959 and 1960, the gross value of
agricultural output fell by 14 percent and 13 percent,
respectively, and in 1961 it dropped a further 2 percent to reach
the lowest point since 1952. Widespread famine occurred, especially
in rural areas, according to 1982 census figures, and the death
rate climbed from 1.2 percent in 1958 to 1.5 percent in 1959, 2.5
percent in 1960, and then dropped back to 1.4 percent in 1961. From
1958 to 1961, over 14 million people apparently died of starvation,
and the number of reported births was about 23 million fewer than
under normal conditions. The government prevented an even worse
disaster by canceling nearly all orders for foreign technical
imports and using the country's foreign exchange reserves to import
over 5 million tons of grain a year beginning in 1960. Mines and
factories continued to expand output through 1960, partly by
overworking personnel and machines but largely because many new
plants constructed during the First Five-Year Plan went into full
production in these years. Thereafter, however, the excessive
strain on equipment and workers, the effects of the agricultural
crisis, the lack of economic coordination, and, in the 1960s, the
withdrawal of Soviet assistance caused industrial output to plummet
by 38 percent in 1961 and by a further 16 percent in 1962.
Data as of July 1987
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