The Great Leap Forward, 1958-62
A Different Kind of Plan
By 1957 the First Five-Year Plan had built steel cities and factories — but Mao Zedong was uncomfortable. The plan had relied on Soviet engineers, technocrats and bureaucratic targets. After Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956 attacked Stalin’s personality cult, Mao distrusted the Soviet model more than ever. He wanted a Chinese revolution that mobilised the masses, not one that depended on Russian advisers. The result was the second Five-Year Plan, launched in 1958 and quickly renamed the Great Leap Forward. Its slogan was ‘catch up with Britain in 15 years’. Its result was the worst peacetime famine in modern history.
By the end of 1958, around 26,000 people’s communes had absorbed roughly 99% of rural households. Each commune averaged 5,000 households and combined farming, small industry, schools, militia training and a communal mess hall.
Mao’s Reasons
Mao’s reasons were ideological as much as economic. The Soviet model relied on bureaucratic engineers; Mao believed China’s revolutionary masses, properly mobilised, could leap past it. He wanted to overtake Britain in steel within fifteen years, prove the superiority of Chinese socialism, and reassert his own authority over rivals like Liu Shaoqi who had run the more cautious First Plan. The 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign had silenced the intellectuals who might have raised objections, and the political space for an enormous experiment was open.
There was also a practical aim: by squeezing more grain and labour out of the countryside, Mao hoped to fund industry without continued reliance on Soviet credit. The peasants had already been moved into higher-stage cooperatives by the end of 1956, so the structural step to communes was small. Mao called for ‘walking on two legs’ — modern industry in the cities and mass effort in the villages, both at the same time.
The People’s Communes
From August 1958, higher-stage cooperatives were merged into people’s communes. Private farming was abolished. Even the small private plots permitted in 1956 were taken back. Family cooking was banned in favour of communal mess halls (around 3.4 million across China by mid-1959), where peasants ate without paying for meals so long as the harvest held. Communes ran their own primary schools, clinics, repair shops and militia. Women were enlisted into mass labour; childcare was collective.
Productivity was supposed to rise through scale and through what Mao called ‘people’s war’ methods on the farm. Older peasant practices were dismissed as superstition. The methods of the Soviet pseudo-scientist Lysenkoism — deep ploughing of three feet, planting seeds three to four times closer than normal, refusing fertiliser — were imposed nationwide. The crops planted under these rules either grew too thickly to ripen, or rotted in waterlogged fields. Inflated reports passed up the system claimed huge harvests; the central state set procurement quotas based on those false figures.
Backyard Steel
The most famous symbol of the Leap was the backyard steel furnace. From August 1958 every commune was required to produce steel. Around 60 million peasants were diverted from the harvest to feed small clay or brick furnaces with scrap iron, household pots and kettles. The output was almost worthless — brittle pig iron, unusable in any real factory. Yet the campaign continued because the political signal — that the masses, not engineers, could industrialise China — mattered more than the economics. The diversion of peasant labour from the fields was a key contributor to the famine that followed.
Students sometimes treat the Great Leap as a well-intentioned plan that hit unexpected problems. The targets were physically impossible from the start — doubling steel output in a year, planting wheat at four times normal density, abolishing private farming overnight. The structure of communal mess halls and backyard steel was always going to fail. Strong answers stress that the policy combined an unworkable agricultural science with an unworkable industrial method, and that the cost was visible to local cadres long before Beijing admitted it.
The Lushan Conference, July–August 1959
By 1959 the strain showed. Marshal Peng Dehuai, hero of the Korean War, returned from a tour of his home province of Hunan with first-hand reports of starvation. At the Lushan Conference (2 July to 16 August 1959) he gave Mao a private letter setting out his concerns: peasants going hungry, exaggerated grain figures, ‘petty-bourgeois fanaticism’ in policy. Mao circulated the letter to the whole conference and treated it as a personal attack. Peng was denounced, stripped of his role as Defence Minister, and replaced by Lin Biao — who would build the Mao cult that came next.
Lushan mattered for two reasons. First, it reasserted Mao’s personal authority over policy at the moment when policy was failing. Second, it made future criticism politically lethal. Even as the famine deepened in 1960–61, no senior figure inside the CCP was willing to challenge Mao directly. The Leap was eased rather than reversed; the communes survived, though private plots quietly returned in many areas under Liu Shaoqi’s recovery measures.
Western historians disagree on where the Great Leap came from. Frank Dikötter (Mao’s Great Famine) argues for a top-down policy of personal command by Mao, with the Lushan Conference as the moment he chose to prolong rather than reverse the disaster. Roderick MacFarquhar emphasises the role of provincial cadres pushing inflated figures upwards to please Beijing. Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone blends both. Mobo Gao argues that the Leap had genuine local successes — irrigation works, small-scale industry, women in mass employment — and that the famine, terrible as it was, has been politicised in Western writing. Top-band answers acknowledge that the Leap was ordered by Mao and amplified by cadres, and that the real argument is over how much human cost was inevitable.
The Great Leap built failure into its design: communal mess halls destroyed peasant incentives, Lysenkoist farming wrecked the 1959 harvest, and 60 million peasants were pulled from fields to backyard furnaces. At Lushan in July 1959, Mao chose to purge his critic Peng Dehuai rather than reverse course.