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Why did Mao begin the Great Leap Forward in 1958
In 1953, under the influence of Russian advisers, the Chinese drew up their first Five-Year Plan for the development of their economy. The plan focused solely on heavy industries like steel and iron production, and neglected light industries. In a production sense, the plan was a great success. It had managed to double the production of coal, cement and machinery; triple production of oil and quadruple production of steel. Although these figures sound fairly incredible, they did not actually mean much when compared to other industrialised nations such as Britain. This was because Chinese industry at the time was extremely backward, so doubling or even tripling production would not make much difference in comparison with the rest of the world. In an attempt to tackle this problem, and to bring China in line with the rest of the world’s industrialised nations, Mao launched his second Five-Year plan named ‘The Great Leap Forward’
The main intention of the Great Leap Forward was for China to match Britain, in an industrial sense, in 15 years. To do this Mao intended on increasing production of heavy industry, light industry and agriculture as well. This would all require large amounts of money, which China did not have. Although China had little money, being the most populous country in the world, it had a tremendous amount of man power. Mao believed any task could be accomplished by harnessing the power of the Chinese people or ‘the energy of the masses’ as Mao called it. By doing this, Mao believed China had limitless potential, yet in actual fact China was behind even tiny nations, such as Belgium. Mao thoroughly believed that China would be the leading industrial nation in some 30 years. It was even more encouraging for Mao to see Russia, China’s Communist ally, become a leading industrial nation. The key to achieving this was the reorganisation of the Chinese people into self-sufficient communes.
The communes were villages, or groups of villages, with occupants who would give up their land, equipment and animals to common ownership by all the members of the commune. The main aim of each commune was to solve China’s financial, environmental and industrial problems by shear manpower. At first, the communes were organised so that nothing could distract them from the work at hand. Examples of this include people working in nurseries so children’s parents won’t have to look after their children and will have more time to work on the fields or in the industries. Each commune was relatively independent, including their own schools, clinics, eating halls, nurseries, entertainments and even local government, but of course the Communists made sure each commune was following its decisions.
One of the decisions made by the Communists was the setting up of the ‘people’s backyard steel furnaces’. The Communists had placed so much effort into steel production that they had built some 600,000 blast furnaces in communes scattered around China. The reason for setting up industry in the communes, in their “backyards”, rather [next page]