by Philip Short
Tan was not alone in such extravagant speculations. Mao himself envisaged asphalt highways177 which would also serve as airstrips, with each township having its own planes and its own resident philosophers and scientists. ‘It's like playing mahjong,’ he exclaimed delightedly as he contemplated China's riches piling up: ‘You just double your stakes!’178 The rest of the leadership concurred. Even the supposedly down-to-earth Deng Xiaoping foresaw every Chinese owning a bicycle, and women wearing high heels and lipstick.179
How did this extraordinary sea-change in attitudes come about? How could Mao, who, in order to win power, had spent the whole of his adult life making finely calibrated judgements about what was possible and what was not, suddenly suspend all rational criteria to espouse a utopian dream which even the most cursory reflection ought to have shown to be impossible? How could men like Zhou Enlai and Bo Yibo, who had held out against much more modest targets only a year earlier, now support plans which, it should have been obvious at the time, were the sheerest fantasy?
Even now, more than half a century later, it is not easy to give a complete answer.
Russia's successful launch of the sputnik, which awoke Mao to the possibilities opened up by technological advance, was a catalyst.180 Science, once his interest had been aroused, fascinated him, but in a medieval rather than a modern sense. He read avidly, but less for new insights than to comfort his own view of the world. His speeches were soon peppered with scientific analogies illustrative of his political ideas: the structure of the atom demonstrated the contradictions inherent in all things; the proliferation of chemical elements showed that ‘matter always changes and converts into its opposite’; metabolism was an example of the tendency of everything to split.181 To Mao, scientific progress justified his long-held belief that mind could triumph over matter (or, as he had put it in 1937, ‘the operation of mental on material things’). Like a latter-day philosopher's stone, it would transmute China's poverty-stricken reality into a glowing new world without scarcity or hunger. Not for him the rigorous discipline of analysis and proof. China had had no Galileo, no Copernicus, no Darwin or Alexander Fleming, to foster a spirit of sceptical enquiry. Modern science, like modern industry, was a recent, alien import, with no roots in Chinese culture, and Mao freely admitted he knew nothing about either.182 It was the concept that he seized on – the prospect of unbounded progress through technical revolution.
In a country with a tradition of scientific and industrial expertise, the targets advanced in the Great Leap would have been dismissed as the idle dreams they were.
But not in China. Within the Politburo, only Chen Yun asked awkward questions on economic matters, and at the beginning of 1958 he was deprived of responsibility for them and forced to make a self-criticism.183 Zhou Enlai may have had reservations. But if so he kept them to himself: he had already risked losing his post after opposing Mao's insistence on ‘rash advance’: once was enough.
Among the other leaders, Liu Shaoqi had his own reasons to champion the Chairman's cause. His relationship with Zhou contained a much greater element of rivalry than either man admitted. The Great Leap was to be run by Liu's Party apparatus, not Zhou's State Council: whatever was bad for the one stood to benefit the other. Moreover, Mao had informed the members of the Politburo Standing Committee two years earlier that, as part of his withdrawal to the ‘second front’, he intended to step down as Head of State.184 At the Second Session of the Eighth Congress, in May, it was officially announced that Liu would succeed him. If Liu had doubts about the Great Leap – and there is no evidence that he did – the prospect of marking his assumption of the highest office of state with a dramatic upsurge in economic growth was evidently enough to make him close his eyes to them.
The same was true of Deng Xiaoping, who as General Secretary was put in charge of the Party Centre's ‘small groups’ which, in a further sign of Mao's dissatisfaction with Zhou and Chen Yun, were set up that summer to supervise the work of the government and the conduct of the Leap.185
The rest of the Politburo was composed of old-guard loyalists, like Lin Boqu, who had been with Mao in Canton in the mid-1920s, and Li Fuchun, now Chairman of the State Economic Commission, whose association with him went back to the days of the New People's Study Society; recently promoted men, such as the first secretaries of Shanghai and Sichuan, whose appointments Mao had sanctioned precisely because of their enthusiasm for the Leap; and military figures, led by Lin Biao (newly elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee) and Defence Minister Peng Dehuai, who had learned the hard way over the years that on all major issues, Mao was invariably right.
None of these men, in 1958, was prepared to challenge him. Most were as convinced as he that a new era of prosperity was at hand. The only group which might have disabused them – the non-Party intellectuals – had been silenced in the anti-Rightist Campaign.
That spring, Mao knew what he wanted; he knew why; but he still did not know how to accomplish it. The middle of May found him still asking plaintively: ‘Apart from the Soviet method, is it possible to find something even faster and better?’186
In fact, although he had not recognised it, the germ of the answer was already at hand. The previous winter's irrigation movement had begun a chain reaction of mergers of co-operatives, in order to permit cadres to mobilise the vast quantities of manpower necessary to build networks of dykes and canals.187
Here were the ready-made building blocks for the communist society to come. By the time the month was out, Mao had found a name, and a concept, dating from pre-Marxist days, which would take this process a step further. What was needed, he said, was a form of ‘large commune’ combining agriculture, industry, commerce, culture, education and self-defence. The name derived from the Paris Commune of 1871, whose ‘deep significance’ he had noted in an article in 1926; the concept came from the utopian socialism of Kang Youwei, who had proposed the abolition of private property and the family, and from the experiments in communal living that he had dabbled in as a young student-teacher during his anarchist days at the end of the First World War.188
On August 9, 1958, Mao formally proclaimed, ‘People's communes are good’, a verdict enshrined three weeks later by an enlarged Politburo meeting at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, on the Yellow Sea coast north of Tianjin.189 The commune, the Politburo asserted, was ‘the best organisational form for the building of socialism and the gradual transition to communism’.190 Mao's secret police chief from Yan'an days, Kang Sheng, who had remained one of the Chairman's confidants, put it more succinctly in a jingle he wrote, which was sung that autumn by peasants throughout China:
Communism is Paradise,
The People's Communes are the way to get there.191
Mao himself was yet more reckless. ‘The communist spirit is very good,’ he told his colleagues at Beidaihe. ‘If human beings only live to eat, isn't that like dogs eating shit? What meaning is there to life if you don't … practise a bit of communism? … We should put into practice some of the ideals of utopian socialism.’192 The way forward, he argued, lay in a return to the ‘supply system’ which the communists had used in Yan'an. Progressively, China would shift towards a non-monetary economy, where food, clothing and housing would all be supplied free. ‘Eating in public mess halls without paying for it is communism’, he declared.193 Eventually even money itself might be abolished.194 Liu Shaoqi quoted Mao as saying that, under communism, there would be ‘no government, no country, no family. This will be implemented everywhere in the future … The family is a historically produced phenomenon and will be eliminated.’195
Over the next two months, the Leap, which had been inexorably gathering momentum since the spring, exploded into a frenzy of activity that changed the face of the Chinese countryside for ever.
Some 500 million people, many of them still struggling to adjust to living in co-operatives, which had been established only two or three years before, found that they now belonged to something called a renmin gongs
he, literally, ‘people's communal organisation’, in which they were to share weal and woe with thousands of complete strangers formerly scattered in separate villages. The commune became the basic unit of rural society and the presumptive model for the rest of the country as well. ‘In future’, Mao said, ‘everything will be called a commune, [including] factories … and cities.’196
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For many, especially richer households, the transition was painful.
Private plots and livestock were confiscated, usually without compensation. In south China, even remittances from relatives overseas were siphoned off for the communal pot. Families were forced to hand over their cooking implements, on the grounds that the mess halls had made them redundant. ‘Happiness Homes’ were promoted for the elderly, and boarding kindergartens for the very young. Parents were urged to give up ‘bourgeois emotional attachments’ in favour of a collectivised, militarised lifestyle, in which the ideal family unit was an able-bodied couple, willing and able to work Stakhanovite hours as members of a shock brigade.
Officially everyone was supposed to have at least six hours’ sleep a night, but some brigades boasted of working four or five days without stopping. Since no one could keep that up, there was widespread faking. The peasants left lanterns alight in the fields all night while they slept, with a look-out to give the alarm should a cadre come along. Material incentives were decried and supposedly rendered unnecessary by the system of free supply, but many communes found that their members refused to work without them. Only the most advanced units could offer the ‘10 guarantees’ which were the system's ultimate goal, assuring their members ‘meals, clothes, housing, schooling, medical attention, burial, haircuts, theatrical entertainment, money for heating in winter and money for weddings’.197
Much of this was animated by nostalgia for the simplicity and fervour of the early years of the communist revolution.198
Party cadres were ordered to toil alongside the masses. Mao himself, together with Premier Zhou Enlai and other Politburo members, was photographed ‘toiling’ at the site of a new reservoir near Beijing. PLA officers, from generals down, were ordered to spend a month a year serving in the ranks. A militia drive was launched under the slogan, ‘Everyone a soldier’, and peasants worked in the fields with antiquated rifles stacked beside them.199
At the core of the Great Leap, however, lay the targets for steel and grain production.
When it became clear that the country's medium and large steel plants would be unable to meet the new targets, Zhou Enlai, whom Mao had placed in charge of the steel drive, proposed a mass campaign using ‘backyard furnaces’, similar to the small, native iron-smelting plants used in the countryside to make farm implements.
The results were immediate and spectacular. The Chinese countryside became a lattice of smoking chimneys. Sidney Rittenberg, who had joined the Party in Yan'an and now worked for Radio Beijing, was an enthusiast. ‘Every hill, every field’, he wrote, ‘glowed with the light of the home-made ovens turning out steel in places where not a thimbleful of metal had ever been produced before.’200 Albert Belhomme, another American who had embraced the communist cause, saw it rather differently. When his paper mill in Shandong was ordered to build furnaces, ‘members of the Party street committees went from house to house, confiscating pots and pans, ripping up iron fences and even tearing locks off doors … They tore the radiators out of our shop at the mill and melted them down.’201 An English visitor to Yunnan, in the far south-west, described how, in one village where four improvised blast furnaces had been rigged up, he found ‘a furious, seething, clattering scene of frenzy … People carried baskets of ore, people stoked, people goaded buffalo carts, people tipped cauldrons of white-hot metal, people stood on rickety ladders and peered into furnaces, people wheeled barrows of crude metal.’ The commune chairman explained that they had learned steel-making from reading a newspaper article.202
The same scenes were replicated in every town and village in China. In Beijing, factories, government offices, universities, even the writers’ association, set up primitive foundries. The editors of Peking Review reported:
In response to the government call … we, too, turned to making steel in our own courtyard … Some brought in broken pans, pots and kettles; others contributed old bricks and limestone; still others turned in all sorts of odds and ends. In a matter of hours, a reverberatory puddling furnace, Chinese style, was built … The only person in the group who could claim some technical know-how was a young man who had visited several office-built furnaces before our furnace went into operation.203
In September 1958, 14 per cent of China's steel production came from small, local furnaces; in October, the figure was 49 per cent. When the movement was at its peak, 90 million people, close to a quarter of the active population, abandoned their normal pursuits to take part.
The result, inevitably, was an acute shortage of agricultural labour, putting at risk the autumn harvest. In October, schools were ordered closed, and students and other non-essential personnel, including shop assistants, sent to work in the fields. Once again, peasant shock brigades toiled through the night.
Mao, and the rest of the leadership, were convinced that an exceptional crop was being gathered in. Close planting, combined with deep ploughing techniques, on experimental plots had produced reports of phenomenal yields. One enterprising model peasant conned Deng Xiaoping into believing that he had obtained the equivalent of 200 tons an acre. Even ‘normal’ high-yielding fields were said to produce 30 tons, and ordinary fields, 9 to 15 tons – in a country where the average yield, even in good years, had up until then been one ton per acre. The Politburo spoke of production increases of ‘one hundred per cent, several hundred per cent, over one thousand per cent and several thousand per cent.’ By the onset of winter, some of the claims were becoming so extravagant that even Mao started to doubt them. But he was still confident enough in the astounding surge in productivity his green revolution had supposedly unleashed to propose that two-thirds of China's arable land be afforested or allowed to lie fallow.204
The drawback of intensive farming was that it required high labour inputs. That led Mao to the fateful decision to abandon China's birth control programme, ultimately the most enduring of all the consequences of the Great Leap.205
Meanwhile China's leaders, in a collective suspension of disbelief, savoured what they were all convinced would be a radiant future.
Had Mao and his colleagues been of a mind to notice, there were already signs that a crisis was brewing. In Yunnan, during the water conservancy campaign, starvation had appeared in some villages as early as February 1958. Later that spring, famine struck Gansu and parts of Guizhou. By April, even before the Great Leap had officially begun, the Central Committee General Office was reporting food shortages and riots affecting more than six million people in sixteen provinces, entailing suicides, starvation, the selling of children by parents unable to feed them, cases of mothers killing their children, and a mass exodus of beggars from the countryside to the cities.206 To a greater or lesser extent, that happened every spring – and had done in China since time immemorial – in the hungry months when the previous year's grain had all been consumed and the new harvest had not yet ripened. The problem had become more acute since the State had proclaimed a monopoly on food crops in December 1953 in order to be able to feed the growing urban population. But such troubles were usually viewed as ‘isolated incidents’, caused by failures of leadership on the part of provincial and local cadres and sabotage by counter revolutionaries and bad elements. In 1958, that was how they were interpreted too.
This time, however, the causes were different. After the men had been sent away to work on irrigation schemes and backyard furnaces, only women, old people and children were left to till the fields. In the autumn, when the harvest was brought in, communal dining halls were established. The peasants gorged, taking literally Kang Sheng's jingle that the communes were the way to paradise and each
person could eat his fill. In two months, the food supply was exhausted. The peasants expected the government to provide more. It did not. Hunger set in.207 To Mao communal eating was a step towards the bright communist future that was his ultimate goal, a way to promote a collective lifestyle and produce economies of scale, since each family would no longer have to cook for itself, and at the same time to eliminate private property, seen as the root of capitalism and of inequalities. In practice, the opposite occurred. Local cadres, entrusted with allocating scarce food supplies, suddenly acquired powers of life and death over the population they controlled. A work group leader or production team secretary could determine whether or not an uncooperative villager survived. While the cadres feasted, and sent up optimistic reports of bumper harvests to the upper levels, the peasants ate bark and elm leaves – if they were lucky – or filled their stomachs with river clay.
By the time the Central Committee met in Wuhan in December, some of this had begun to percolate through. Mao announced that grain production would be a staggering 430 million tons, more than twice the previous best harvest, but that, in the interests of ‘prudence’, a lower figure of 365 million would be made public. The steel target of 10.7 million tons had been fulfilled, he said, but only nine million tons (later revised downward to eight million) were of acceptable quality. That led him to the remarkable admission that the Beidaihe steel figures had been unrealistic. ‘I made a mistake,’ he told the plenum. ‘I was [too] enthusiastic at that time, and failed to combine revolutionary fervour with a practical spirit.’ But his very willingness to criticise himself in this way was the clearest proof that he believed the Leap to have been a huge success. That was obvious, too, from the new steel targets he proposed: although lower than at Beidaihe, they were still resolutely upbeat: 18 to 20 million tons in 1959, and 60 million in 1962.208