The Great Leap Forward and the famine
From Recovery to Revolution
The early PRC years brought genuine economic recovery. The First Five-Year Plan (1953–57) was modelled closely on the Soviet system: heavy industry — steel, coal, machine tools — was the priority. With Soviet technical assistance, hundreds of large industrial projects were completed. Agricultural output grew steadily, partly through collectivisation, which was accelerated from 1955 as the Party absorbed individual peasant plots into cooperatives. By the end of the First Five-Year Plan, China had made genuine industrial gains. Then, in 1958, Mao abandoned the Soviet model entirely.
The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, aimed to transform China into a major industrial and agricultural power within fifteen years. Peasants were organised into people's communes of up to 10,000 households. Steel production targets were set that required even rural peasants to smelt metal in backyard furnaces, diverting labour from food production.
The People's Communes and Backyard Furnaces
By late 1958, approximately 26,000 communes had been established, absorbing virtually the entire rural population. Each commune was self-governing in theory but subject to CCP production targets in practice. Private plots were abolished. Meals were eaten in communal canteens. Peasants were told they were “eating from the same big pot.”
Steel production was an obsession. Mao set a target to overtake Britain in steel output within fifteen years. To meet local quotas, peasants were ordered to build backyard furnaces and smelt whatever metal they could find: farming tools, cooking pots, door hinges. The resulting iron was mostly too brittle to use. Meanwhile, the harvest of 1958 rotted in the fields because the agricultural labour force had been diverted to the steel campaign. Party officials who reported the true state of production were accused of pessimism and punished. This political dynamic — where honest reporting was dangerous — was central to why the disaster escalated.
Dazhai was a small commune in Shanxi Province, held up as a national model of socialist success. Its brigade leader, Chen Yonggui, was celebrated as a “model peasant” who had supposedly transformed barren hillside terraces into highly productive farmland through collective effort and political will. Mao issued the slogan “In Agriculture, Learn from Dazhai” in 1964, after the Great Leap had ended, and it was promoted across China into the 1970s. However, later investigations found that Dazhai’s reported yields had been systematically falsified and that the commune had received undisclosed state subsidies. Dazhai illustrates how the reporting system of the Great Leap Forward — where cadres faced punishment for honest accounts — generated systematically false data that concealed the scale of failure from the national leadership.
The Great Chinese Famine
Between 1959 and 1962, China experienced the deadliest peacetime famine in recorded history. Scholars have proposed widely differing estimates of the death toll: Frank Dikötter gives 45 million excess deaths; Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist whose own father died in the famine, estimates 36 million; Jasper Becker suggests 30 million; more conservative estimates from some Chinese researchers place the figure at 15–20 million. The range reflects genuine uncertainty in the historical data and the fact that Chinese government records were suppressed for decades. The Party’s own contemporary explanation — “three years of natural disaster” — was a deliberate misrepresentation: meteorological data shows that weather conditions in 1959–62 were not significantly worse than normal. The famine was overwhelmingly caused by policy failure.
Scholars estimate between 15 and 45 million deaths during the Great Leap Forward famine (1959–62). The CCP attributed the famine to “three years of natural disaster,” but later scholarship — including work by Frank Dikötter and Yang Jisheng — demonstrates the famine was primarily caused by policy failures, not weather.
In July 1959, at a leadership conference at Lushan, Defence Minister Peng Dehuai wrote Mao a private letter criticising the Great Leap Forward’s excesses. He noted food shortages, the uselessness of the backyard furnace steel, and the falsification of production figures. Mao chose to read the letter aloud to the conference delegates and accused Peng of leading a “military club” against the Party. Peng was stripped of his offices and subjected to criticism sessions. His purge sent an unmistakable signal: even the most senior officials who questioned Mao’s policies risked destruction. The result was that the Great Leap Forward continued for a further three years while the famine deepened.