Forty years ago, when the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed in Beijing on October 1, 1949, China was a country that had been ravaged by decades of civil war, foreign invasion, and social upheavals--a country whose economy had been disrupted and many of its industrial centers damaged or destroyed. Within ten years after they took power, however, the Chinese communists had created a centralized and totalitarian apparatus that unified and exercised effective control over the Chinese mainland. They had also brought order out of economic chaos and launched a succession of ambitious development programs.
While the first decade of communist rule produced, on balance, a modest record of achievement in the development of the mainland economy, the second decade was beset with enormous economic difficulties from the very start. In 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong, dissatisfied with the progress of the economy during the first Five-year Plan (1953-57), launched the "Great Leap Forward" program, intending to "transform China from an agricultural into an industrial country" virtually overnight. The already ambitious output targets previously set were scrapped in favor of higher goals, which then were successively raised even higher, projecting rates of development that were unprecedented in China or anywhere else.
To speed industrialization, the regime initiated a reckless drive to mobilize millions of rural villagers throughout China to build small backyard factories using local resources for the production of pig iron, steel, and other commodities. Most startling of all, within a few months, in the fall of 1958, China's almost 750,000 collective farms were amalgamated into some 26,000 much larger communes in a move propagandized as a giant advance toward full communism but primarily designed to enhance the regime's ability to mobilize rural manpower and resources for state-directed projects.
Catastrophe soon followed. Agricultural failures and serious economic dislocations, caused by the excesses and irrationalities of the Great Leap and commune movements, were further aggravated by the sudden withdrawal of Soviet technical aid in 1960 and by natural calamities in 1959 and 1960. This produced a major economic crisis in China during 1960-62. Food rations sank to subsistence levels for the nation as a whole, and more than 20 million Chinese died due to outright starvation or poor health.
Challenge to Mao's Leadership
With the consequences of the Great Leap and commune adventures becoming increasingly evident, the first real challenge to Mao's leadership was not long in coming. A preliminary inkling of this came in December 1958, when Mao suddenly relinquished the chairmanship of the PRC in favor of Liu Shaoqi, but remained as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although this was variously interpreted at the time, Red Guard posters in 1966 quoted Mao as stating that he had been forced out as chief of state in 1958 by Liu and other opposition leaders, who subsequently failed to consult him on policy matters. Whether or not Mao's reported claim is true cannot be determined with certainty; nevertheless, it is clear that his political authority and control over government policy began declining in 1959.
The rising opposition to Mao was confirmed at the August 1959 plenum of the CCP Central Committee
...
Read Full Article
|
