What was great leap forward

Undernourishment grew among the urban population and, with it, cases of edema and other maladies, but urbanites fared comparatively well. As food reserves in the countryside diminished, peasants began dying in droves by the summer of They collapsed in fields, on roadsides, and even at home where family members watched their corpses rot, lacking the energy for burial or even to shoo away flies and rats.

Some families would hide the remains of relatives in the home so that the living could collect the food rations of the deceased. Hunger drove the starving to forage for seeds, grasses, leaves, and tree bark, and when even these became scarce, they boiled leather or ate soil just to fill their stomachs, even when it destroyed their digestive tracts.

Given the prevalence of hunger and exposed corpses, some inevitably turned to cannibalism. Although this involved scavenging for the most part, occasionally persons—usually children—were intentionally killed as food. Although tales of famine were leaking out of China, Western scholars had little sense of the scale of the disaster.

Estimates of deaths directly related to the famine range from a minimum of twenty-three million to as many as fifty-five million, although the figure most often cited is thirty million. The Chinese have always faced famine. According to one study, China experienced some 1, major famines in its long history, but what distinguishes the Great Leap Forward from its predecessors are its cause, massive scope, and ongoing concealment.

Modern famines, on the other hand, stem from human factors such as war or ideology exacerbated by natural conditions. Most tragically, the subsequent purging of Great Leap excesses from history and the unspoken taboo that continues to surround it have prevented the Chinese from reflecting on and learning from this event, even as it remains largely ignored outside of China.

While doubtless many lessons could be derived from the Great Leap Forward, it perhaps stands above all as a testament to the value of independent thought and free speech. The worst peacetime famines of the modern era non-coincidentally occurred under totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Union in —33, with an estimated six million dead; the Great Leap Forward in China —62, with some thirty million dead; and North Korea in , which, like the Great Leap, killed around 5 percent of the population.

Download PDF From —, an estimated thirty million people died of starvation in China, more than any other single famine in recorded human history. Collectivization After the Korean War, the Chinese government turned single-mindedly to realizing socialism through domestic development on two fronts—industrialization in cities and collectivization in the country- side.

A propaganda poster from chineseposters. A Hundred Flowers Bloom 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. The Anti-Rightist Campaign Propaganda poster depicting a bumper harvest. One of the most infamous innovations of the Great Leap involved an industrial revolution in the countryside.

Too terrible. Whether it is due to this process, or more likely his years working within the system, Yang is absolutely self-possessed. His grandfatherly smile is intermittently clipped by caution as he answers a question. Though a sense of deep anger imbues his book, it is all the more powerful for its restraint. Yang Jisheng comes across as a sweet old man, but he has a core of steel. He has complete integrity. He is, she points out, part of a generation of quietly committed scholars. Despite its apparently quaint title, Annals of the Yellow Emperor is a bold liberal journal that has repeatedly tackled sensitive issues.

But writing Tombstone was also a personal mission. Yang was determined to "erect a tombstone for my father", the other victims and the system that killed them.

The book opens with Yang's return from school to find his father dying: "He tried to extend his hand to greet me but couldn't lift it … I was shocked with the realisation that 'skin and bones' referred to something so horrible and cruel," he writes.

His village had become a ghost town, with fields dug bare of shoots and trees stripped of bark. For all his remorse and grief, he regarded the death as an individual family's tragedy: "I was 18 at the time and I only knew what the Communist party told me. Everyone was fooled," he says. I was on a propaganda team and I believed my father's death was a personal misfortune.

I never thought it was the government's problem. He joined state news agency Xinhua after his graduation, while the political madness of the Cultural Revolution was wreaking fresh havoc on the country: "When I look back on what I wrote [in that first decade], I should have burned all of it," he says. Even as he wrote his paeans to the party, his job began to offer glimpses of the truth behind the facade. One day, he was shocked to overhear a senior leader in Hubei province say that , people had died there — the first hint that his father's death was not an isolated incident.

It was, he says, a gradual awakening. He continued to work for Xinhua, a task made easier by the country's reform and opening process and his own evolution; by the third decade of his career, he says, "I had my independent thinking and was telling the truth. I was cheated and I don't want to be cheated again. Paradoxically, it was his work for Xinhua that enabled him to unearth the truth about the famine, as he toured archives on the pretext of a dull project on state agricultural policies, armed with official letters of introduction.

Numerous people helped him along the way; local officials and other Xinhua staff. Did they realise what he was working on? Struggle to realize the general line! Double happiness I , October. Double happiness II , October.

Put organizations on a military footing, put actio… , October. Blast furnaces rise in level ground releasing red… , October. Crossing the Yellow River while sitting in a peanu… , November. Chairman Mao visits a homemade blast furnace , November.

The melons are sweet, grain and rice are fragrant,… , November. Bring in 1, dan of foodstuffs, harvest 10, j… , November. Everybody is fully occupied in production, the tra… , December. Untitled People's communes I Untitled People's communes III Untitled People's communes IV Untitled People's communes V Untitled People's communes VI Untitled People's communes VII Ride the East Wind, leap forward again and again! Choose fresh food, be careful with preservation , January. Establish the grand guiding principle of communism… , February.

When the dining hall is well-run, the production s… , February. Prosperity brought by the dragon and the phoenix , February. The vegetables are green, the cucumbers plumb, the… , February. Strike the battle drum of the Great Leap Forward e… , February. If the target is ten, take measures to achieve twe… , May. Innovate technology to welcome abundant harvests , June. Everybody studies science, everybody does experime… , August.

The commune is like a gigantic dragon, production… , September. Develop industrial and agricultural production, re… Speed up the mechanization of agriculture The communes are big, the people numerous, the nat… The communes are big and the backbone is strong, i… Greatly develop the sectors of culture, communicat… The power to fight disasters is strong to quicker… Beat the battledrum, in we will continue the… , January.

Hurry towards an even greater future with the spee… , January. Ride the wind and cleave the waves to realise a Le… , January.

Advance towards the modernization of agriculture! Drum up boundless enthusiasm to start a mammoth te… , April. Long live the three red banners , June. Long live the Great Leap Forward , July. Start the movement to increase production and prac… , September. Long live the Great Le… , September.

Welcoming spring , December. People's communes are good , October. Search this site Search. Our Facebook page Our posters on Flickr. The results, unfortunately, were catastrophic. Between and , millions of Chinese citizens were moved onto communes.

Some were sent to farming cooperatives, while others worked in small manufacturing. All work was shared on the communes; from childcare to cooking, daily tasks were collectivized.

Children were taken from their parents and put into large childcare centers to be tended to by workers assigned that task. Mao hoped to increase China's agricultural output while also pulling workers from agriculture into the manufacturing sector. He relied, however, on nonsensical Soviet farming ideas, such as planting crops very close together so that the stems could support one another and plowing up to six feet deep to encourage root growth.

These farming strategies damaged countless acres of farmland and dropped crop yields, rather than producing more food with fewer farmers. Mao also wanted to free China from the need to import steel and machinery. He encouraged people to set up backyard steel furnaces, where citizens could turn scrap metal into usable steel. Families had to meet quotas for steel production, so in desperation, they often melted down useful items such as their own pots, pans, and farm implements.

With hindsight, the results were predictably bad. Backyard smelters run by peasants with no metallurgy training produced such low-quality material that it was completely worthless. Over just a few years, the Great Leap Forward also caused massive environmental damage in China. The backyard steel production plan resulted in entire forests being chopped down and burned to fuel the smelters, which left the land open to erosion. Dense cropping and deep plowing stripped the farmland of nutrients and left the agricultural soil vulnerable to erosion as well.

The first autumn of the Great Leap Forward, in , came with a bumper crop in many areas, because the soil was not yet exhausted.