![]() ![]() These successes bolstered faith in the party and primed the Chinese population for supporting radical programs that promised to raise China from the feudal to the Socialist, and eventually Communist, stages of social evolution. Initially, these mass campaigns were aimed at-and effectively combated-social vices such as opium addiction and prostitution, but soon, campaigns targeted enemies of the revolution and, during the Korean War (1950–1953), the party galvanized the population to protect its North Korean ally against the American-led United Nations. These measures served as the mechanism for state oversight of everything from food rations to housing to marriage, while at the same time ensuring complicity with state directives and mobilization for mass political campaigns. The reorganization of Chinese society under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) necessitated the classification of China’s vast population into discrete groups such as peasants, landlords, laborers, capitalists, etc., followed by the issuance of registration cards and assignment to a danwei, or work unit. Whereas the previous Guomindang (GMD) government of Chiang Kai-shek had rested on the support of Chinese elites, Mao implemented, on a national scale, policies that made him popular among the masses, including reducing rents and redistributing land to farmers in the countryside. Mao’s speech from atop Tiananmen gate on October 1, 1949, announcing the formation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), augured a bright Communist future for the Chinese people who had suffered decades of warfare, runaway inflation, and misgovernment. We conclude with a comparison of this famine to others and, finally, the lesson that this harrowing experience offers in the dangers of suppressing critical, independent thought. In the interest of informing a general readership of both the facts and lessons of the Great Leap Forward, the following article outlines the disaster, beginning with China’s successful, centralizing reforms of the early 1950s Mao’s subsequent devolution into a paranoid despot as he purged critics and fostered a blind, fanatical devotion to his own naïve policies and how this spiral ultimately ravaged the Chinese population. Too few Americans are aware of this epic disaster, and even among the Chinese, it is not well-understood. But the fanatical push to meet unrealistic goals led to widespread fraud and intimidation, culminating not in record-breaking output but the starvation of approximately one in twenty Chinese. In 1958, Chairman Mao launched a radical campaign to outproduce Great Britain, mother of the Industrial Revolution, while simultaneously achieving Communism before the Soviet Union. The ironically titled Great Leap Forward was supposed to be the spectacular culmination of Mao Zedong’s program for transforming China into a Communist paradise. Most tragically, this disaster was largely preventable.
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