Mao’s intention towards the Great Leap Forward was to establish at once a complete system of proletarian ideology and a new social system. It proved both Mao’s compliance to experimentation and his belief in common Chinese People. Mao certainly determined the strategy and tactics of the Chinese Revolution under the leadership of the proletarian party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He definitely laid down that the Chinese Communist Party should accomplish first the New Democratic Revolution (NDR) since China was then still a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country with a small number of working class but a vast number of peasants. His vision was that NDR must be led by the proletariats but the peasants should certainly be the main force.
Mao actually visualized declassing and transforming the whole country into a working class of bountiful production where people will eat as much as they want (Becker, 1996, page 80) and in free of cost. Mao envisioned that the peasants would certainly be the main force in the revolution of the productive system.
China, under the leadership of Mao, thought that the country was on the threshold of creating a Communist society, in which all people would work together to make the country-land productive and totally self-sufficient.
To start with, Mao Tse-tung launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign (Bai Hua Yun Dong) in 1956 to prevail the support of Chinese intellectuals by calling for their active participation in Chinese Communist Party (CCP); Hundred Flowers Campaign encouraged Chinese intellectuals to exchange their constructive criticism of the policies taken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
However, in August 1958 (Cheek, 2002, page 160), Mao proclaimed the vision of the Great Leap Forward at the eve of Beidaihe Conference. All Chinese were called to engage in physical labor to sow the seeds of the communist revolution by transforming the economy, so skillfully that the later bloomed and flourished as natural phenomenon. In order to increase agricultural production, millions of people were engaged in land reclamation and construction of irrigation systems.
To exceed the West in industrial output, 20,000 self-sufficient “people’s communes” were established (Becker, 1996, page 73) to overtake England in the production of major products.
The special economic and social plan initiated by Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung, namely the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), with the intent of:
- Radically increasing agricultural and industrial production in the People’s Republic of China.
- National as well as Agrarian revolution.
- Attaining full economic development by surpassing the West in industrial output.
- Bringing China to the brink of a communist society aiming at finishing the socialist revolution.
- Modernize Chinese Economy.
- Retain the unchallenged authority of the proletariats.
- Embracing both the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the proletarian socialist revolution.
- Ideological unity between the Party, bourgeois-democratic and working class.
- Surpass west in industrial production in ten years.
- To make china self-sufficient.
Mao’s vision of the rural collectivization claims to offer a historically progressive vision of social change; and the success of rural reform depended on the initiative of hundreds of millions of ordinary peasants who had not the slightest intention of making reforms but did so anyway.
Bibliography
Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine. 1st ed. London: J. Murray, 1996.
Cheek, Timothy. Mao Zedong and China’s revolutions: a brief history with documents. 1st Ed. New York: Palgrave, 2002.