Categories: Opinion and Editorial

Remember the Great Leap Forward?

We tend to commemorate the anniversaries of triumphs and tragedies: Independence Day (July 4), the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7), Veterans Day (set on the date of the end of WWI, November 11), 9/11 (Patriot Day), etc.

But, strangely, there’s no commemoration of perhaps the greatest tragedy — involving the largest loss of human life — in human history: The Great Leap Forward.

For anyone unfamiliar, this is a brief summary of what happened:

After taking control of China, the Communist Party — under the leadership of Mao Zedong — sought to reorganize the country’s economy. They wanted to transform China from a mostly agrarian economy to an industrial one, with factories and railroads.

So, in 1958, Mao and the Communists introduced a five-year plan called “The Great Leap Forward”. As part of this command economy plan, agricultural workers were forced to join collectivized farms, while privately owned farms were eliminated. New agricultural ideas were introduced in order to increase the amount of food grown. And many workers were pulled off of farms to make steel in home-made, backyard furnaces.

It all failed spectacularly. The “innovative farming techniques” the Communist Party introduced proved to be largely untested and flawed. That — combined with the decrease in farm labor after peasants were diverted to steelmaking — resulted in a loss of agricultural output. The steelmaking also failed. Untold amounts of time, labor, and natural resources were sacrificed in order to discover the hard way that you can’t make steel in a backyard furnace.

But none of the local Communist Party officials wanted to report to their superiors that they’d failed to meet their agricultural production quota — such failures don’t get you promoted; they more likely get you jailed — so officials routinely lied. Party leaders believed they’d sparked an agricultural revolution, and sold “surplus” food overseas. Of course, this just led to more shortages.

People knew things were bad in their own respective area, but there was little in the way of freedom of travel, press, or information. So very few understood that things weren’t just bad here or there, they were bad pretty much throughout China. The select few who did have such a perspective, naturally, were the top leaders of the Communist Party of China, who were loath to admit that they were to blame. Instead, the shortcomings of the Great Leap Forward were blamed on counter-revolutionaries and reactionary opponents of the Communist revolution.

For a while, at least. At a certain point, even the Communist Party of China was forced to accept that their economic plan was a disaster. The Great Leap Forward had caused The Great Chinese Famine, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people. (Due to a lack of reliable census data, estimates of the death toll vary. But most are in the 15-50 million range.)

These people didn’t die because Communist Party leaders were ignorant. Rather, they died because Mao Zedong and his fellow Party leaders brutalized anyone who exposed their ignorance. There were plenty of Chinese people who knew enough to point out that the agricultural and steelmaking techniques being advocated were unreliable, if not bogus. These people either spoke up and died, or remained quiet. Millions died so that Mao would not have to suffer the fate of blushing with embarrassment that his economic ideas were revealed to be defective.

Fifty years ago, in early 1961, the Communist Party of China finally began to roll back The Great Leap Forward. Mao lost power, but would soon return to kill more innocent Chinese people as the head of The Cultural Revolution. There are few people — maybe Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin — who might rival Mao Zedong in being responsible for such a massive death toll. So I suggest we adopt September 9 — the date of Mao’s death in 1976 — as a focal point.