Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Great Leap Forward

Starting point is 00:00:00 In 1958, the People's Republic of China instituted its second five-year plan since the revolution. Its goal was to rapidly modernize China and boost agricultural and industrial output to levels comparable to the Western world. China was going to become a modern country, not through the widespread adoption of machinery, but through the mass mobilization of labor. It didn't work. Not only didn't it work, but it was one of the greatest failures in world history. Learn more about the great leap forward, what it was. and why it failed so spectacularly on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

Starting point is 00:00:51 ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The Great Leap Forward represents one of the most tragic episodes, not just in Chinese history, but in world history. It was a disaster on a par with the world wars that were fought in the 20th century. Despite the massive loss of life that resulted from the Great Leap Forward,

Starting point is 00:01:31 it has never received the same level of attention as World War I or two. To understand why the Great Leap Forward happened, we need to step back to China in the 1950s. Mao Zedong and the Communist Party had successfully unified China after a lengthy civil war, and were eager to transform their largely agricultural nation into a modern industrial power. The great leap forward emerged from several different factors. First, Mao was deeply influenced by Soviet industrial success, but wanted to surpass it using distinctly Chinese methods. He believed that human willpower and revolutionary enthusiasm could overcome any material constraints, a philosophy that would prove catastrophically wrong.

Starting point is 00:02:12 Second, there was genuine pressure to modernize quickly as China felt vulnerable surrounded by more industrialized nations. The campaign officially launched in 1958 with impossibly ambitious goals. Steel production was supposed to double in a single year and to be on par with the United Kingdom in just 15 years. Agricultural output was expected to increase dramatically through new farming techniques and sheer determination. Now, having goals is fine, but there was a real The real question was how was China going to actually do this? Mao's plan was not to industrialize like every other country on Earth that industrialized. He was going to do it in what he considered a unique Chinese way. He was going to throw millions of people at the problem and massively

Starting point is 00:02:59 de-urbanized Chinese society. Mao believed in the power of collective effort and mass enthusiasm and felt that it would be enough to propel the campaign forward. Mao emphasized communal living, indoctrination and collective work rather than expert-driven planning. Of course, there was absolutely no economic basis for any of this. It had never been done before and had never even been tried. Moreover, even from a Marxist perspective, Mao's ideas wouldn't work. Karl Marx developed a theory where societies went through stages. He claimed that industrial societies had to go through a capitalist stage before arriving at true communism. Mao thought that he could just bypass everything and go directly to communism via rural peasantry, not industrial workers.

Starting point is 00:03:48 And he also just assumed that everybody would just try really hard and that would be sufficient. One of the first things he did was to move millions of people from cities to the countryside to live in collective farms. This reverse urbanization was unprecedented in modern history. Urban workers, students, and even some bureaucrats were sent to the countryside to provide quote-unquote voluntary labor, often under pressure or state coercion. The idea was to treat agriculture with the same seriousness as industrial production and to scale up rural infrastructure through sheer manpower. This was the first of many major problems during the Great Leap Forward.

Starting point is 00:04:30 Industries and urban centers were often left shorthanded as skilled workers were relocated to the countryside. Simultaneously, the agricultural sector didn't benefit significantly because these urban laborers, Brewer's often lacked farming experience. Mao assumed that people were fungible assets, but they're not. Everyone has unique skills that have been developed over time. You can't take a factory worker and a farmer, have them switch places, and expect them to perform the same, at least not right away.

Starting point is 00:04:59 The mass migration of people from urban to rural areas wasn't the only major mistake. One of the most famous ones had to do with how Mao planned to increase steel production. If you know anything about steel production, you're probably aware that steel is produced in large factories. Mao was going to achieve his grand steel production goals through millions of backyard steel furnaces. Mao's logic was incredibly simplistic. Lots of steel furnaces would mean lots of steel. The problem was that these small-scale furnaces were horribly inefficient. Getting resources to a few large steel factories is much easier than,

Starting point is 00:05:39 sending them to millions of small furnaces. Moreover, there was also a huge issue of quality. Almost nobody who made backyard steel was any good at it, and what they produced was of such low quality that it couldn't be used for anything. However, it was even worse than being inefficient and having low quality. Mao demanded high production quotas,

Starting point is 00:06:01 and to meet these unreasonable quotas, people began melting down whatever steel products they had. This included everything from pots and pans, to farm tools. Not only were farmers destroying the tools needed for farming, but they were also spending enormous amounts of time on this useless steel production program instead of doing what they did best, farming.

Starting point is 00:06:25 Another program that was a part of the Great Leaf Forward was the Four Pests Campaign. The Four Pest Campaign was a public health and hygiene campaign designed to eliminate four specific pests believed to spread disease and damage crops. mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. In particular, the Eurasian tree sparrow. Mosquitoes flies and rats all probably kind of makes sense in that they can spread disease.

Starting point is 00:06:52 However, why sparrows? Sparrows, like many birds, eat grain. So, according to Mao's logic, they were to be eradicated to help agricultural production. People would go out banging pots and pans and drums to scare sparrows into counterfeit. constant flight, eventually causing them to die from exhaustion. Nests were destroyed, eggs were smash, and chicks were killed. Schools, workers, and military units would compete to see who could kill the most sparrows. Well, the anti-sparrow program worked, and the sparrow population plummeted. But it turned out that sparrows eat more than grain. They also eat insects.

Starting point is 00:07:32 In particular, locusts. And without the sparrows, locus plagues devastated the country's and destroyed agricultural production in many areas. But there was even more insanity. The Chinese Communist Party promoted what can best be described as pseudoscientific agricultural techniques. They felt that communist theory could dictate what would work in farming. And much of this was not far from Lysenkoism, which was practiced in the Soviet Union, which I covered in a previous episode.

Starting point is 00:08:03 One of the techniques they pushed was close planting. Mao and his agricultural advisors believe that crops of the same species were friendly and would thrive when grown tightly together in extremely dense configurations. In fact, overcrowding caused crops to compete for sunlight, water, and nutrients, stunting their growth or killing them outright. Instead of boosting yields, this led to dramatically lower productivity. The party also promoted something called deep planting. They claim that plowing the soil four to six feet deep, or one to two meters, would allow roots to grow deeper, improve erration, and increase access to nutrients. In reality, deep plowing damaged soil structures, destroyed beneficial microorganisms, and exposed nutrient-poor subsoil degrading the fertility of the land. It also required far more labor in time with little to no benefit, and in some areas, flooding and erosion followed.

Starting point is 00:09:01 communist cadres were encouraged to dig up and relocate fertile soil from other locations, often hillsides or riverbanks, to improve crop yields and poorer fields. This was incredibly time-consuming and also led to more erosion without any increase in productivity. Absent chemical fertilizers, human excrement, and animal remains were used, which just ended up spreading disease. Traditional agricultural practices that had sustained Chinese farming for centuries were declared feudal or reactionary and were discarded. Peasants were forced to comply with nonsense techniques even when they knew better. Despite all of these things that were working to decrease agricultural production, quotas were increased. Given the circumstances, it resulted in exactly what you'd expect.

Starting point is 00:09:52 People just lied about production. Wet grains were often weighed rather than dry grains. Local officials would create demonstration plots of land to show higher-ups how successful they were, even though everything else was falling apart. At every level of the government hierarchy, there was an incentive to lie and to accept all of the lies of the people below you. By the time the information got to the top, everyone just assumed that everything was going according to plan. But despite the lies, some grains still had to be delivered,

Starting point is 00:10:24 which meant taking whatever they had to try to back up their claims. all of the grain was used to feed people who remained in the cities. By 1959, all of the things that I've mentioned, as well as many more, combined to create a massive famine. The misallocation of labor, the improper agricultural techniques, the destruction of farm equipment to make steel quotas, the locust swarms, and the exportation of everything that was grown to appease high-ranking officials left no food in most rural areas. What followed was the greatest famine in world history. In villages across the country, starvation led to the complete breakdown of social norms and human dignity. Families were reduced to eating tree bark, roots, grass, mud, and sometimes even soil itself. The bark of trees was stripped bare and starving children searched for animal burrows for scraps.

Starting point is 00:11:22 Villagers boiled leather, shoes, and belts to extract nutrients from the hide. People began to die in their homes, in fields, on roe sides, and bodies were sometimes left unburied because entire households had perished. Cannibalism was documented in numerous eyewitness accounts and provincial records that were later uncovered. In some areas, corpses were being consumed, and in the worst cases, there were reports of people being killed for food. Despite the scale of the catastrophe, the Chinese state continued to deny the existence of famine, at least publicly. Mao Zedong was largely shielded from the worst reports, and when confronted with evidence, you often

Starting point is 00:11:59 blame natural disasters or local officials for sabotage. The central leadership was also reluctant to reverse course, as doing so would mean admitting that the policies of the Great Leap Forward had failed. Eventually, by 1961 and 1962, the Chinese Communist Party began quietly reversing its policies. Communal kitchens were dismantled, private plots were once again allowed, and quotas were reduced. Leaders such as Liu Xiauchi and Deng Xiaoping pushed through pragmatic reforms that slowly alleviated the famine. Outside of China, the rest of the world had little idea what was happening. Foreigners weren't allowed outside of cities, so they couldn't see for themselves what was going on. The first clue of what was happening came in 1961 when there was a surge of refugees into Hong Kong

Starting point is 00:12:48 who recounted stories of hunger, death, and repression in rural provinces. But it was a It wasn't until the mid to late 70s, and especially the 1980s, after Mao's death and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, that scholars gained significant access to Chinese archives and demographic data. The demographic catastrophe became undeniable once researchers like Judith Bannister, a United States demographer, analyzed official Chinese statistics in the early 1980s. Her 1987 estimate that roughly 30 million people died of starvation or related causes shocked the academic world and has since become one of the most widely cited figures. Other estimates have placed the number of dead as high as 55 million.

Starting point is 00:13:33 This is far greater than the number of people killed in the First World War, and the higher estimates approach the number killed in the Second World War. Many famines in history have been caused by human activity, more often than not war. The Great Leap Forward was responsible for the greatest famine in history, and it was also almost totally preventable. A host of almost laughable economic and technical errors and the inability of anybody to speak truth to power out of a fear of reprisal resulted in one of the greatest disasters that the world has ever seen.

Starting point is 00:14:13 The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups,

Starting point is 00:14:39 you too can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Great Leap Forward

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