Great Leap Forward

Great Leap Forward, economic, social, and political initiative in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the first attempt by Mao Zedong to break away from the Soviet model of socialism and to build rapidly a socialism appropriate to Chinese conditions. He launched it in December 1957 and it lasted until 1960. It re-emphasized the importance of moral as well as material incentives in building socialism.

Massive propaganda campaigns incited the people to leap into the lower stage of communism and to overtake the United Kingdom within 15 years. The self-reliant, rural commune became the basic principle of social living, downplaying the family and amalgamating collective farms into larger units of tens of thousands of inhabitants. Everyone, Communist party cadres included, was expected to perform physical labour. All available metal, including kitchen utensils, was collected for backyard furnaces to turn into tools and weapons. Individuals, even children, were given daily quotas of pests to kill, such as birds. Cities experimented with communes too, growing their own food. Armies of workers swarmed over enormous construction sites.

Some features of the GLF were reasonable, such as the attempt to devise medical and educational programmes according to China's needs instead of relying upon Soviet ones. Overall, however, chaos ensued, especially in agriculture, exacerbated by poor weather and prolonged by Mao's stubbornness in refusing to hear of failures. Between 1960 and 1962 14 to 20 million more people died than in comparable years of the People's Republic of China. It was the first major setback for the CCP since 1949, and Mao was obliged to retire to the “second line” of decision-making.