🏭 Too slow and too costly
The first plan put most money into heavy industry. The big factories needed expensive machines and trained experts, and farming, which fed the country, grew only slowly. Mao wanted faster progress.
Change Under Mao, 1949-63 » The Great Leap Forward: Reasons and Key Features
What you'll learn this session
Study time: 30 minutes
Edexcel spec: Paper 2 Section B, Breadth study B4, Key topic 3
- Why Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958
- How the people's communes worked
- Why millions built backyard furnaces
- The huge building projects of 1958
By 1957 China had a one-party state, collective farms and a Soviet-style Five-Year Plan. Mao Zedong was not satisfied. He wanted China to grow much faster, and in 1958 he launched an enormous campaign called the Great Leap Forward. This lesson explains why, and what the campaign looked like. What it led to is covered in the next lesson, The Great Leap Forward: Famine and Failure.
Key terms:
- Great Leap Forward: Mao's campaign from 1958 to transform China's farming and industry at great speed, using the labour of millions of people.
- People's commune: a very large unit of farming and daily life, made by joining many collectives together.
- Backyard furnace: a small furnace built in a village, school or factory yard to make iron and steel.
- Communal canteen: a shared kitchen where commune members ate together, often for free.
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Unlock This CourseWhy did Mao launch the Great Leap Forward?
The Great Leap Forward grew out of Mao's disappointment with the first Five-Year Plan (the Soviet-style plan of 1953-57, which built big factories with Soviet help). Historians point to several reasons.
💪 People as a resource
China had a huge population but little money for machinery. Mao believed that millions of willing workers, full of revolutionary spirit, could do what machines did elsewhere.
🏆 Catching up
In November 1957 Mao visited Moscow. The Soviet leader Khrushchev said the USSR would overtake the USA in about 15 years, and Mao said China would overtake Britain in steel and other output in 15 years. China wanted to show it could modernise faster than the old powers.
👑 Mao's confidence
Land reform and the campaigns had made the Party strong. After the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, which punished critics of the Party, few people dared to disagree with Mao, so it was easier for him to push through a bold plan.
Mao also wanted China to find its own road to socialism rather than copy the Soviet Union exactly. Change: the plan to use masses of labour replaced the Soviet idea of relying on big factories and experts.
The people's communes
The first big change was in the countryside. In 1958 collectives were joined together into people's communes. A first experimental commune was set up in Henan province in spring 1958, and in August the Party leaders agreed to spread the idea across the country. By the end of 1958 about 26,000 communes covered almost all the peasant households in China.
A commune was far bigger than a collective. A typical one had several thousand households. It was run by the Party and organised almost everything:
- Farming and work. Peasants worked in large teams, and the commune could send thousands of workers to a project.
- Industry. Communes ran their own small factories and workshops.
- Services. Communes ran schools, clinics and nurseries so that women could work in the fields.
- Communal canteens. Families ate together, and food was often free at first.
- Private life. Private plots and animals were taken over by the commune, and people were organised almost like soldiers, with the commune also providing a local militia.
The aim was to move towards a communist society in which everything was shared. Continuity: as in the collectives, the land belonged to the group, not to individual peasants. Change: the group was now much bigger and controlled far more of people's lives.
Backyard furnaces
Mao believed that steel was the sign of a modern country. He set a target of 10.7 million tonnes of steel for 1958, double the 5.35 million tonnes made in 1957. The big steelworks could not do this alone, so in the autumn of 1958 the Party told ordinary people to make iron and steel themselves.
🔥 Who
Peasants, factory workers, teachers and students worked in shifts, day and night. Tens of millions of people took part.
🍲 How
Small furnaces were built in yards and fields. People melted down pots, pans and tools to provide metal, and cut down trees for fuel.
📢 Why
Steel was needed for machines and building, and local leaders were pressed to show that their area was hitting its targets.
Huge building projects
The third feature was the use of mass labour on enormous projects. From the winter of 1957-58, millions of peasants were sent to dig irrigation canals, build dams and make reservoirs, mostly by hand. The aim was to bring water to more fields so that harvests would grow. One famous example is the Ming Tombs Reservoir near Beijing (1958), where hundreds of thousands of volunteers worked and Mao and other leaders joined in the digging for a day to set an example. Workers were told to work faster than ever before, and the slogan was to "go all out, aim high".
The campaign also had very high targets for grain. Leaders at every level were expected to promise bigger and bigger harvests.
Common mistakes
- Mixing up collectives and communes. A commune joined many collectives and was much larger, and it ran industry, schools and canteens as well as farming.
- Describing the Great Leap Forward as a plan like the first Five-Year Plan. It relied on mass labour instead of large Soviet-aided factories.
- Writing about the famine here. That is a result, covered in the next lesson. In this lesson, explain the aims and what people were told to do.
Exam-style question
Explain two ways in which the Great Leap Forward (1958) was different from the first Five-Year Plan (1953-57). [6 marks]
Model answer
One difference was in how industry was developed. The first Five-Year Plan built large modern factories with Soviet help, such as the Anshan steelworks, and relied on machinery and experts. The Great Leap Forward, however, called on tens of millions of ordinary people to make steel in small backyard furnaces in 1958, using melted pots and tools, so industry moved from big factories to villages.
A second difference was in the countryside. Under the first plan peasants were mostly in collectives, which were fairly small and left families with their own homes and small private plots. In 1958 about 26,000 communes, each with thousands of households, replaced them, running farms, schools and communal canteens, so the Party controlled far more of people's lives.
What lifts this to the top level: each way compares both periods directly, with precise facts on each side.
Exam tip
Build each paragraph as "In the first plan... whereas in the Great Leap Forward...", with a fact on both sides. A paragraph about only one period cannot reach the top level.
Recap
- Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958 to modernise China much faster, using people instead of expensive machines.
- Reasons: the first plan was slow and costly, China had masses of labour, Mao wanted to catch up with Britain, and he was confident after silencing critics.
- Features: about 26,000 people's communes with canteens, schools and clinics; backyard furnaces aiming at 10.7 million tonnes of steel; huge irrigation and building projects.
- Change: collectives became far larger communes and industry moved into villages.