Quick questions on Mao's Great Leap Forward 1958 to 1962: HSC Modern History Personality

The Anti-Rightist Campaign had silenced criticism within the elite. Mao, restored after the 1956 Eighth Congress demotion of his Thought, prepared a great forward push. The Third Plenum (September to October 1957) and the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress (5 to 23 May 1958) launched the Great Leap Forward (Da yuejin). The slogan was "more, faster, better, more economical" (duo, kuai, hao, sheng); the target was "to overtake Britain in 15 years" (gan chao Yingguo).

The Beidaihe Conference of August 1958 endorsed the People's Commune (renmin gongshe) as "the bridge to communism". By the end of 1958 the existing 740,000 agricultural cooperatives had been merged into about 26,000 communes, averaging 5,000 households (with some up to 20,000). The communes:

The doubling of the 1958 steel target from 5.35 million tonnes to 10.7 million tonnes (announced June 1958) was beyond the capacity of the modern steel sector. The campaign for "small native (xiao tu) blast furnaces" mobilised about 90 million people and built around 600,000 backyard furnaces by late 1958. Iron pots, tools, and door fittings were melted down. The 1958 steel figure of 11.08 million tonnes was claimed met; most of the backyard output was unusable pig iron.

Provincial Party secretaries, competing for Mao's favour, reported impossible yields. The "wind of exaggeration" (fukua feng) inflated the 1958 grain figure to 375 million tonnes (announced), against an actual figure later revised to about 200 million tonnes. Procurement quotas were set on the inflated figures. Henan under Wu Zhipu and Anhui under Zeng Xisheng were the worst cases.

Politburo and Central Committee members met at Lushan to review the GLF. Reports of famine were already arriving. Defence Minister Peng Dehuai, after a tour of his Hunan home county, handed Mao a private letter on 14 July 1959. Peng's letter criticised the "petit bourgeois fanaticism" of the Communes and the Backyard Furnaces and noted the famine.

The Great Famine (sannian da jihuang, the "three years of great hunger", officially the "three years of natural disasters") killed millions. Death-toll estimates:

The Communes were retained in name but decollectivised in substance. The "Sixty Articles on Agriculture" of March 1961, drafted by Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai, restored private plots and the production team as the basic accounting unit. Liu Shaoqi, after a tour of his Hunan home village in April 1961, told Mao that "30 percent was natural calamity and 70 percent human error". The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference (11 January to 7 February 1962) was a self-criticism session at which Liu and Deng took practical command of the economy.

Khrushchev withdrew approximately 1,400 Soviet technical advisers from China in July 1960, tearing up around 343 contracts. The withdrawal compounded the Great Leap collapse. The dispute had ideological dimensions (peaceful coexistence; the "transition to communism"; the cult of Stalin) and personal ones (Khrushchev's and Mao's mutual contempt). The break was open by 1963.

Roderick MacFarquhar (The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2 and 3, 1983, 1997) gave the canonical elite-political account.

The official PRC formulation; modern scholarship rejects it.

China was a net grain exporter in 1959 to 1960.

Peng's letter raised structural critique. Mao's response was a political coup.