The Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward was a creative yet disastrous interruption in Chinese economic development. It is one of those "moments" in Chinese history that is the epitome of Mao Zedong's willingness to experiment, as well as his political genius in seizing control of the forms of government out of the hands of his intellectual and political adversaries within the Communist Party of China. Given that more conservative leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, were not in agreement with Mao on the policies of the Great Leap Forward. The implementation of these policies resulted in disaster, generating a crisis in Chinese society as well as a massive famine that would in the end be resolved in ways unfavorable to Mao's political, economic, and cultural vision of a future China. Mao wanted Chinese direct producers, particularly farmers, to use more advanced technologies than the relatively crude implements that were available but he argued against a continuation of the Stalinist approach because it relied on what we would today call capital-intensive investments. In the Stalinist views on "modernization" the number one aspect was the building of larger "economies of scale" industrial operations, particularly those operations that were most critical to further industrialization. The Stalinist approach of placing a heavy focus on an investment in heavy industry at the expense of light industry and agriculture required vast net resources. The resources that were needed were obtained by draining surplus products out of the rural work force: a process that has been described as super-exploiting the rural labor force. This Stalinist approach, which could be described as "big is beautiful," was neither the first nor the last instance of placing rural lives at a lower priority than industrialization. This approach, when applied to China, gave proof to the fact that production that was most scarce in China, large-scale machinery and other forms of relatively advanced

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