Mao's Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962, including the People's Communes, the Backyard Furnaces, the Lushan Conference of 1959, the dismissal of Peng Dehuai, and the Great Famine in which an estimated 15 to 45 million people died

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to explain the Great Leap Forward and assess Mao Zedong's responsibility for its consequences, including the famine. Strong answers integrate the May 1958 launch, the People's Communes, the Backyard Furnaces, the Lushan Conference dismissal of Peng Dehuai, the famine death toll, and the 1962 retreat.

The answer

Origins and aims, 1957 to 1958

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).

Mao's "general line for socialist construction" combined accelerated industrialisation with the leap from socialism to communism via the People's Communes. Behind it lay the Sino-Soviet ideological rivalry (Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech on Stalin, the November 1957 Moscow Conference of communist parties at which Mao claimed leadership of the international communist movement) and Mao's annoyance at Liu Shaoqi's and Zhou Enlai's caution in 1957.

The People's Communes, August to September 1958

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:

• Abolished private plots, private livestock, and most private property.
• Operated communal mess halls (gonggong shitang) supplying free food.
• Combined economic, political, military, and educational functions (the "three combinations" and "four-in-one").
• Mobilised vast irrigation and construction projects.

The first commune, Chayashan (Henan) under Wu Zhipu, was created in April 1958 and became the model.

The Backyard Furnaces, 1958

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. The campaign withdrew agricultural labour at harvest.

Falsified grain figures and the wind of exaggeration

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. Sichuan under Li Jingquan exported grain through the famine.

The agricultural pseudoscience of Trofim Lysenko (close-planting, deep-ploughing, the "eight-character charter") was applied with predictably damaging results.

The Lushan Conference, 2 July to 16 August 1959

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.

Mao circulated the letter on 16 July as evidence of a "right-opportunist anti-Party clique". On 23 July 1959 Mao counter-attacked, threatening to "go to the countryside and lead the peasants to overthrow the government". Peng was supported by Zhang Wentian, Huang Kecheng, and Zhou Xiaozhou but isolated by Liu Shaoqi's and Lin Biao's siding with Mao. Peng was dismissed as Defence Minister and Vice Premier; Lin Biao replaced him at Defence. The "Anti-Right-Opportunist" campaign that followed labelled about 3 million cadres rightist opportunists.

The famine, 1959 to 1962

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

• Cao Shuji (Chinese demographer, 2005): about 32.5 million.
• Yang Jisheng (Tombstone, Chinese edition 2008, English 2012): about 36 million.
• Frank Dikoetter (Mao's Great Famine, 2010): at least 45 million.
• Felix Wemheuer (Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union, 2014): a more conservative 15 to 25 million.
• Judith Banister (China's Changing Population, 1987): about 30 million.

The range $15$ to $45$ million is honest. The variation reflects the boundary between "excess deaths" and "averted births", the quality of provincial statistics, and the period defined (1959 to 1961 or 1958 to 1962).

The worst-hit provinces were Anhui, Henan, Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, and Guizhou. The state continued to export grain (4.2 million tonnes in 1959, 2.7 million in 1960) to repay Soviet debt and to support Albania, North Korea, and North Vietnam. Cannibalism is documented in scholarly accounts of Anhui and Gansu. Urban populations were partially protected by rationing; the rural deaths were heaviest.

The retreat, 1960 to 1962

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. Mao retreated to the "second line".

Sino-Soviet split, July 1960

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.

Timeline

Historiography

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

Jasper Becker (Hungry Ghosts, 1996) was the influential English-language journalism on the famine, drawing on Chinese sources.

Yang Jisheng (Tombstone, 2008/2012) used internal Party archives to give 36 million deaths and direct responsibility to Mao.

Frank Dikoetter (Mao's Great Famine, 2010) used provincial archives to argue at least 45 million deaths, with Mao culpable in the strongest sense (knowing and continuing).

Felix Wemheuer (2014) argued the high-end figures overstate and that the Soviet collectivisation famine of 1932 to 1933 is a closer analogue.

Justin Yifu Lin (1990) and Wen-Hao Cheng offered econometric accounts emphasising the "exit option" loss when peasants could no longer leave cooperatives.

Maurice Meisner (Mao's China and After, 3rd ed. 1999) treats the GLF as Mao's "utopian" overreach.

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (2005) treat Mao as deliberately killing peasants to fund foreign aid.

Common exam traps

Calling the famine a "natural disaster". The official PRC formulation; modern scholarship rejects it.

Forgetting the export of grain. China was a net grain exporter in 1959 to 1960.

Treating Lushan as a personal dispute. Peng's letter raised structural critique. Mao's response was a political coup.

In one sentence

Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962, launched at the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958, abolished private agriculture into about 26,000 People's Communes by late 1958, mobilised approximately 90 million people in about 600,000 Backyard Furnaces, generated falsified grain figures that drove confiscatory procurement, was defended against Peng Dehuai's accurate criticism at the Lushan Conference of July to August 1959 with Peng's dismissal and the elevation of Lin Biao, and produced the Great Famine of 1959 to 1962 in which an estimated $15$ to $45$ million people died, before being wound back at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference of January to February 1962 with Mao's retreat to the "second line" and Liu Shaoqi's and Deng Xiaoping's practical command of the economy.