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Great Leap Forward (1958–1962)

In 1958 Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, vowing to "overtake Britain and catch America": the General Line for socialist construction, backyard steel furnaces in every village, the communization of the countryside, and an exaggeration frenzy that swept the nation. The Beidaihe Conference set steel output at 10.7 million tons and pushed the grain estimate to 750 billion jin — while the actual 1958 harvest was only 400 billion jin. Inflated targets, false reporting and reckless command piled layer upon layer, and the campaign led directly to the Great Famine of 1958–1962. This page records how the Leap was launched, decided and executed, and what it caused; the famine itself is covered in "Great Famine (1958–1962)."

Time

1958–1962 (peak 1958–1960)

Place

Nationwide; the steel campaign and communes covered city and countryside

Decision-makers

Mao Zedong (initiator); Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping (implementation); provincial chiefs (layered inflation)

Aftermath

Led directly to the 1958–1962 Great Famine; after the 1962 Seven Thousand Cadres Conference Mao retreated to the "second line"

Launch: from "anti-rash-advance" to the General Line

The Great Leap Forward did not appear out of nowhere one day in 1958. It had a gestation, beginning with Mao Zedong's attack on "opposition to rash advance" in the winter of 1957.

In 1956, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and others had argued for scaling back excessive targets in the economic plan — the so-called "anti-rash-advance" position. Mao did not openly object at first, but from late 1957 his attitude changed. According to Volume II of History of the Chinese Communist Party, that winter Mao began denouncing "anti-rash-advance" as something that "deflated the morale of 600 million people" and shackled mass initiative.

At the January 1958 Nanning Conference the denunciation went public and sharp. Mao named names against "anti-rash-advance," his fire aimed squarely at Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun. Zhou was forced into a self-criticism, admitting "anti-rash-advance" had been wrong. The March Chengdu Conference kept up the attack; the mood was one-sided — anyone who still spoke of cutting targets or seeking truth from facts was "rightist," a deflater. After those two meetings, no one in the Party dared say "no" to high targets again — the last obstacle to the coming exaggeration frenzy was cleared.

Before Nanning there had been the Hangzhou Conference (January 3–4, 1958), where Mao first named "anti-rash-advance" and called for "smashing superstition" in economic work; Nanning turned that warning into open denunciation. Note the irony: the 1956 "anti-rash-advance" camp were the economic professionals — Zhou, Chen Yun. Mao knew little of economics, yet settled an economic dispute with a political purge. From then on, targets were set by political posture, not by what was possible — the institutional starting point of every absurdity that followed.

It was also at Chengdu that Mao raised the cry of "overtaking Britain and catching America": three hard years to transform the country's face, "seven years to catch Britain, eight more to catch America" (per Mao Zedong: A Biography, 1949–1976). The seed had been planted in November 1957, when Mao visited Moscow and told the conference of communist parties that "the East Wind prevails over the West Wind" — the socialist camp had, he declared, overtaken the capitalist one (per the same biography). The Soviet satellite and its claim to have surpassed America in steel convinced him the tide of history had turned. China, the most populous socialist country, should "sprint" to the front — much of the Leap's confidence came from this misreading of the world.

On May 5–23, 1958, the Second Session of the 8th Party Congress adopted the General Line: "go all out, aim high, and build socialism with greater, faster, better and more economical results." Mao called on the whole Party to "smash superstition, liberate thought, dare to think, speak, act and take charge." Once the General Line passed, the Great Leap stopped being Mao's personal idea and became the Party's political mission: targets could only go up, never down; speed could only quicken, never slow. From that day, exaggeration carried an imperial sword.

Beidaihe: the decisive meeting

If the Second Session fired the starting gun, then the enlarged Politburo meeting at Beidaihe on August 17–30, 1958 was the Leap's true "decisive meeting" — the figures that would decide the fate of China's peasants for the next four years were all settled there.

Steel: 10.7 million tons, "take steel as the key link." The meeting set 1958 steel output at 10.7 million tons, double 1957's 5.35 million, and raised the slogan "take steel as the key link, leap forward across the board" (per History of the Chinese Communist Party, Vol. II). Steel became the yardstick for everything: any locality or unit missing its steel target was "rightist," backward.

Grain: from 600–700 billion jin up to 750 billion. The meeting estimated the 1958 harvest at 600–700 billion jin (60–90% above 1957's 390.5 billion), then raised it mid-session to 750 billion. Mao even proposed 800 billion–1 trillion jin for 1959. Yet according to the National Bureau of Statistics' later revision, the actual 1958 harvest was only 400 billion jin — even the low end of the meeting's estimate (600 billion) overshot reality by half.

Communes: resolution passed August 29. The meeting adopted the "Resolution on Establishing People's Communes in the Countryside," calling for communization nationwide. Mao declared at the session that "people's communes are still the best," summing them up as "big and public": large in scale, high in public ownership (per Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Vol. VII). Once the resolution issued, rural cooperatives across China were "upgraded" into communes within days.

During the conference Mao also toured Xushui in Hebei and Qiliying in Henan, delighting in slogans like "sprint into communism." Every display of pleasure from the top leader was watched below: Xushui's "sprint into communism," Qiliying's "one day equals twenty years" — localities competed to invent ever more astonishing slogans. Liu Shaoqi, visiting Xushui on August 6, endorsed the line too (per the Chronology of Liu Shaoqi). With top and bottom cheering together, exaggeration could never be braked again.

After Beidaihe the Leap hit its peak: steel furnaces, mess halls, yield satellites — all three at once. From this point the "targets" lost all contact with what the land could actually yield — the only road left was fabrication.

The conference communiqué announced: "1958 will be a year of the Great Leap Forward in China's socialist construction," and "the establishment of the people's communes marks a new stage." The more optimistic the communiqué's language, the crueler the reality: as it was published, the 1958 autumn harvest had already been gutted by the labor drained into steelmaking — of which the communiqué said not a word.

Backyard steel: the whole nation smelts

At Beidaihe's command, the whole nation began smelting steel. The slogan was "small (small furnaces), native (native methods), mass (mass movement)": no proper steelworks needed — every village lit fires, every household puffed smoke, earthen furnaces rose in the fields, and steel was "made."

The mobilization was unprecedented. Per History of the Chinese Communist Party, Vol. II, by the end of 1958 some 90 million rural laborers had been thrown into backyard steelmaking. At harvest time, every able-bodied worker was up in the hills; nobody was left to bring in the crops — "much of that year's grain went unharvested, and output fell sharply."

Smelting needed fuel, so the hills were stripped of trees — green mountains turned bald in days. It needed feedstock, so cadres went door to door collecting ironware: woks, hoes, sickles, door knockers, padlocks — anything smashable went into the furnace. People later summed it up: "trees felled bare, ironware surrendered bare, labor exhausted bare."

And what came out? Earthen furnaces never got hot enough and there was no technique; what they produced was mostly high-sulfur, brittle "iron lumps," unusable. The announced 1958 output was 11.08 million tons (target "met"), but per History of the Chinese Communist Party, Vol. II, only 8 million tons of it actually qualified as steel — an admission that nearly 30% was scrap. And of that "qualified" 8 million, how much barely scraped through has never been fully disclosed; the original ledgers remain closed (unverified).

The greater absurdity: to protect the steel quota, localities confiscated the peasants' farm tools for smelting — hoes smashed, woks smashed. What would they plant with come spring? The backyard furnaces drained not just 90 million laborers but the countryside's means of production itself. Little steel was ever made; agriculture was hollowed out first.

The furnaces did not go cold at the end of 1958. Through 1959 "take steel as the key link" continued and earthen furnaces multiplied; only in 1960 did Beijing begin winding native steelmaking down. Per History of the Chinese Communist Party, Vol. II, the campaign consumed staggering human and material resources for a pittance of usable steel. The deeper losses cannot be tallied: the forests stripped bare, the tools smashed, the two harvests lost — no one has ever fully reckoned that account.

People's communes: "big and public"

Moving in lockstep with the steel campaign was the communization of the countryside. After the August 29 Beidaihe resolution, localities worked overnight to "upgrade" advanced cooperatives into people's communes. By late September 1958, over 90% of farm households had been communized; per History of the Chinese Communist Party, Vol. II, by end of October 740,000-plus cooperatives had been reorganized into 26,000-plus communes, covering over 99% of households.

Mao summed up the commune as "big and public": big in scale (a single commune ran from several thousand to tens of thousands of households), high in public ownership (land, draft animals and tools all seized by the commune). Private plots were taken back, household poultry and livestock confiscated, and the "communist wind" blew: "one leveling, two transfers" — egalitarian redistribution and uncompensated requisition; today your grain is transferred, tomorrow his savings are leveled.

The communal mess hall was the emblem. Communes built dining halls everywhere — "open your belly and eat," meals free of charge. In the first days peasants thought they'd gotten a bargain and gorged; soon the "big pot" became a waste contest: eat or lose out, grain poured away like water. Halls overspent wildly; in many places most of the year's rations were eaten through in months.

At the November 1958 Zhengzhou Conference, the center began to grasp what the "communist wind" had wrecked and started correcting; but the correction barely began before the 1959 Lushan Conference's anti-rightist turn stopped it cold. The commune system itself — peasants stripped of land and of any say in production, "showing up without working" — lasted until household contracting dismantled it in the early 1980s.

The correction stopped, but the "communist wind" did not. Through the winter of 1958 into 1959 it blew harder: grain, cash and materials were leveled away from production teams under "one leveling, two transfers." In February 1959 the second Zhengzhou Conference issued "Regulations on the Management System of the People's Communes," attempting restitution — implemented half-heartedly below. Not until the 1962 "Sixty Articles on Agriculture" (Revised Draft Regulations on the Work of Rural People's Communes) confirmed three-level ownership with the team as the base did "big and public" retreat, on paper, after four years of havoc.

The exaggeration wind

The exaggeration wind was the Leap's most surreal chapter — and the numerical foundation of the high requisitions that followed.

On June 8, 1958, People's Daily published the first yield "satellite": the Chaya Mountain Satellite Commune in Suiping, Henan — 2,105 jin per mu averaged over five mu of wheat. Once that number appeared, localities began competing: you report 2,105, I report 5,000; you 5,000, I 10,000.

On August 13, 1958, People's Daily carried Hubei's Macheng Jianguo Commune at 36,900 jin per mu of rice. Soon Sichuan's Pixian reported 45,217 jin per mu — which, per Yang Jisheng's Tombstone, was a night-time fraud: rice transplanted from other fields and stitched together into one mu, a fake showcase for visitors.

On August 27, 1958, People's Daily ran the editorial "How bold the people, how productive the land," driving the frenzy to its peak. Earlier, on April 29, the scientist Qian Xuesen had published "How much can grain yield per mu?" in China Youth Daily, using "scientific calculation" to argue yields could reach tens of thousands of jin per mu — dressing fabrication in a lab coat (per published reports).

Beyond exaggeration there was reckless command. Targets set above, "high-yield measures" invented below: dense planting — tens of thousands of seedlings per mu, "victory through density"; deep plowing — turning the soil a meter or two down, "the deeper the soil, the stronger the roots." The press trumpeted these "measures"; cadres inspected them in the fields; refusal meant "lagging behind in thinking." The densely planted seedlings rotted in the paddies; the deep-plowed fields yielded nothing that year. Reckless command and exaggeration were twins: one did the boasting, the other left the peasants to pay when the boasts burst.

The mechanism was simple: the higher you reported, the more "revolutionary" you were; honest numbers meant "rightist," a white flag. From commune to brigade to county to prefecture to province, each layer inflated the last; Beijing set requisition quotas on the fabricated figures, and quotas were inflated downward layer by layer. The grain was still in the fields, but the paper "bumper harvest" had already decided how much each peasant must hand over — the requisition chain of the Great Famine, detailed in the next section.

Once started, exaggeration could not stop, because it was wired to cadres' careers. County chiefs assigned quotas to communes, communes to brigades; miss the target and you were "rightist," removed. To keep their posts, brigade leaders reported fiction upward — and the fiction became the next round's higher target. This cycle of "officials produce numbers, numbers produce officials" spun faster through 1958–1960. It broke only in 1961, when Liu Shaoqi went to the villages to investigate and heard the truth (per the Chronology of Liu Shaoqi: 44 days in Hunan, April–May 1961) — but by then the starved numbered in the tens of millions.

How the Leap made the famine

The Leap and the Famine are not two stories but one story in two acts: the reckless command of 1958–1960 became the starvation deaths of 1959–1962. Three transmission chains, each lethal.

First: high requisitions. Beijing set quotas on fabricated output. Real grain in 1958: 400 billion jin; on paper: 750 billion. Real grain in 1959: 340 billion jin; the plan demanded 800 billion–1 trillion. Requisition teams went to the villages with the paper figures and seized food grain, seed grain and survival grain alike. In many places, once the public grain was delivered, there was nothing left in the peasants' pots.

Second: mess-hall waste. In the first months of "open your belly and eat," communal halls across China overspent appallingly. The grain wasn't eaten — it was squandered: open supply, crude cooking, waste on a staggering scale. When requisitions tightened in 1959 and the halls ran dry, peasants lost even their last collective ration.

Third: labor drained away. Ninety million people smelting steel in the hills meant nobody to bring in the harvest; giant water-conservancy works drained more labor still. "Much of that year's grain went unharvested" — the "bumper harvest" of 1958 existed mostly on paper. Worse: after the 1959 Lushan anti-rightist turn, no cadre dared report disaster upward, and "anti-concealment" grain searches pressed down layer by layer — the catastrophe was covered up while the death toll climbed.

A fourth chain is often missed: from the winter of 1958 into the spring of 1959, the whole country was mobilized for farmland water-conservancy works, draining rural labor once more. The 1958 autumn harvest had already been gutted by steelmaking; the winter–spring labor drain then crippled 1959's spring plowing and sowing. Link by link, every stage of agricultural production was hollowed out by "campaign."

The timeline is stark: 1958 — launch and fabrication; 1959 — after Lushan, no one dares report disaster; 1960 — requisitions peak, deaths peak; 1961 — "readjustment" begins; 1962 — the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, the famine ends. Officially it is still the "three years of natural disasters," but at that 1962 conference Liu Shaoqi said "30% natural disaster, 70% man-made" (per History of the Chinese Communist Party, Vol. II). Natural or man-made — the three chains are laid out above; judge for yourself.

The full record of the famine — provincial calamities, every methodology for the death toll — is at Great Famine (1958–1962).

Who was responsible

Who launched the Leap and who carried it out is well documented.

Mao Zedong — initiator and chief decider. From denouncing "anti-rash-advance" to raising "overtake Britain and catch America," from the General Line to Beidaihe's 10.7 million tons of steel and 750 billion jin of grain — every key decision came from Mao. Through 1958 he toured and spoke repeatedly, turning up the heat under the high targets; whoever poured cold water was "rightist." The 1981 Historical Resolution labeled the Leap a "grave mistake," but its wording on Mao's personal responsibility was extremely restrained (per the Resolution's text).

Liu Shaoqi — enthusiastic supporter in 1958, retrenchment manager later. In 1958 Liu spoke repeatedly in support of the General Line, the Leap and the communes. Per the Chronology of Liu Shaoqi, on August 6, 1958, visiting Xushui County in Hebei, he endorsed the local slogan of "sprinting into communism." After 1961, Liu ran the Party's front line, led the "readjustment," and removed a batch of satellite-launching provincial chiefs.

Zhou Enlai — self-criticism, then implementation. At the January 1958 Nanning Conference Zhou made a self-criticism over 1956's "anti-rash-advance" (per History of the Chinese Communist Party, Vol. II), then as premier implemented the General Line and oversaw the layer-by-layer inflated planning targets.

Deng Xiaoping — participant in implementation. Then General Secretary of the Central Committee, he took part in the center's leadership and execution of the Leap (general statement; his specific division of labor unverified).

Provincial chiefs — launching satellites, inflating downward. Henan's Wu Zhipu, Anhui's Zeng Xisheng and others competed to launch yield satellites and report high targets to prove "loyalty," then handed requisition quotas down the chain based on the fictions. Wu Zhipu later became one of the men chiefly responsible for the Xinyang tragedy (see the Great Famine page).

Alongside the provincial barons, a cohort of central and municipal leaders served as cheerleaders for the General Line. Per published records, Shanghai's First Secretary Ke Qingshi — the most active of them in 1958 — hailed the General Line at every meeting as the beacon illuminating all work, and branded doubters of the high targets "right opportunists." The cheering was not harmless background noise: it convinced Mao the whole Party and people "sincerely supported" him, and pushed his confidence higher still.

It is telling that a catastrophe on this scale produced no accountability at any level, for any individual. The 1981 Historical Resolution said only "grave mistake" and named no names; Mao never apologized for the Leap or the famine to his death. That "no one responsible" outcome is itself a historical record: when decisions carry no consequences for the deciders, disaster will repeat.

In one line: the decisions were Mao's, the execution was the whole Party's — from the center through province, prefecture and county, nobody touched the brakes; those who dared (like Peng Dehuai later) were crushed at the 1959 Lushan Conference, which only prolonged the disaster.

Figures: reported vs. real

The Leap ran on two sets of books: the figures announced in the press and at meetings at the time, and the National Bureau of Statistics' later revisions. Set side by side, the gap is the measure of the fabrication.

On a per-capita yardstick the numbers are more shocking still: with China's population at about 660 million at end-1958 (NBS figure), 750 billion jin meant over 1,100 jin per person — while the real 400 billion jin meant barely 600 per person. The paper "bumper harvest" was nearly double reality, yet requisition quotas were issued against the paper. The extra 350 billion jin of grain never existed; what existed were emptied peasant granaries.

Impact

The most direct impact: the Great Famine. The Leap's high requisitions, mess-hall waste and drained labor force produced the Great Famine of 1958–1962 outright. Studies put the death toll between 15 and 45 million (methodologies compared on the Great Famine page). It was one of the largest man-made famines in human history — and its causes are the decisions recorded in the eight sections above.

The 1962 Seven Thousand Cadres Conference: Mao retreats to the "second line." In January–February 1962 the Party held its enlarged central work conference. Liu Shaoqi told it "30% natural disaster, 70% man-made," and Mao was forced into a self-criticism (per History of the Chinese Communist Party, Vol. II). Afterward Mao withdrew to the "second line"; Liu ran the Party's front line and carried out the eight-character policy of "readjustment, consolidation, replenishment and improvement" (adopted at the 9th Plenum in 1961). The Leap was officially over.

Prologue to the Cultural Revolution. Mao in retreat never accepted blame. He treated the self-criticism at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference as a humiliation and grew ever more suspicious that Liu was "usurping" him. In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution — and its first victim was Liu Shaoqi (see "Cultural Revolution" on this site). The Leap's failure and the Mao–Liu rupture were the Cultural Revolution's most direct political prologue.

One often-missed detail: into the early 1960s, the "three red banners" — the General Line, the Great Leap Forward, the people's communes — remained politically untouchable. Liu's readjustment tiptoed around them; to question them was to be anti-Party. After 1962 Mao launched the Socialist Education Movement (the "Four Cleanups"), putting rural cadres through struggle once more — the rights and wrongs of the Leap were never truly settled inside the Party, leaving the ideological and organizational ground fully prepared for the Cultural Revolution.

Institutional legacy. The commune system survived into the early 1980s, dismantled only by household contracting. The Leap left a whole generation of peasants utterly disillusioned with collectivization — the instant success of household contracting in the early 1980s traces straight back to the catastrophe of 1958–1962.

A final word on how the official story changed. After the 1981 Historical Resolution, "the Great Leap Forward" was frozen in official discourse as a "grave mistake made in exploration"; textbook coverage shrank year by year, and the words "great famine" all but vanished, replaced by "three difficult years" and "three years of natural disasters." A campaign that killed tens of millions is glossed over lightly — which is why this site gives the Leap its own page: figures can be revised and narratives softened, but what happened between 1958 and 1962 should not be forgotten.

Related images (external links)

No verifiably licensed Great Leap Forward site photos; external links used. News-agency images not embedded.

• Chinese Wikipedia: 大跃进
• English Wikipedia: Great Leap Forward