S20: Leap and Fall
History of China Since 1800
February 20, 2026
Our hometown is on fields of hope: Lyrics
Our hometown is on fields of hope.
Smoke from cooking drifts over newly built houses.
A small river flows by the beautiful village.
A field of winter wheat, a field of sorghum.
Ten miles of lotus ponds, ten miles of fragrant fruit.
Ai hey yo, ai hey yi hey ya
Hey, we live on these fields for generations.
For her prosperity, for her flourishing.
Key questions
- Political economy: The Road to the Great Leap forward?
- Why course correction failed?
- Experience and legacy of famine: How did it change the PRC?
Old Guards, New Order
Art in Service of Politics?
Farewell My Concubine: What is the subject?
- Tragic romance among Cheng Dieyi, Duan Xiaolou, Juxian, Yuan Siye
- Peking Opera (as essence of Chinese “national culture”)
- Chinese history (fall of Qing, war with Japan, civil war, early PRC, Cultural Revolution)
Discuss: Gender and revolution
- Did women have a Communist revolution?
- How did rural women remember the revolution?
- “Perhaps intergenerational communication about the past always entails bad transmisison.” Explain.
Summary: Campaigns in the Early 1950s
- High degree of planning, preparation and systematic execution
- Differentiated and gradual approach, but also decisive interventions
- Not just top-down operation, but popular participation and voluntary involvement
- Order restored, and open resistance quelled
- Period of change, conflict, and continual experimentation
- Difficulties of remembrance: campaign narrative vs. personal narrative
The Famine
- Worst famine in human history
- Number of casualties debated, but 15-45 million deaths
- More deaths than political campaigns and world war
- Peace-time and preventable
Land reform
- Violent struggle: 800K landlords killed
- Decline of rural elites and the rise of new village governance
- Classifying peasants as rich, middle, or poor peasants
- Groundwork for later campaigns to collectivize agriculture
Impact of land reform
- Demolition of existing foundations of political and economy power
- Shifting allegiance from family and lineage to new party-state
- Mobilizing popular support: New generation of party members and rural leaders
- Violence as key feature: landlords as social outcasts
Who’s responsible?
- Policy: “Collectivization”
- Personality: “One wrong idea in the head of a foolish man with power”
- Regime type: “Totalitarianism”
State socialism as growth machine
- Rise of the Soviet Union: industrialization of 1930s created major power during WWII
- From 1928 to 1949: Annual rate of 3.2% – double that of the US
- Economic model: Rapid, heavy industrialization through agricultural collectivization
- Political model: How to develop unity of thought and action
Pillars of the planned economy
- Market demand and financial markets no longer drivers of the economy
- Economic activity driven by “production demand”
- “Unproductive demand” – e.g. consumer goods – suppressed
- Key goal: capital formation at accelerated pace
From Farm to Factory
- State ownership of all productive assets/s20 and financial sector
- Collective farms: Sell food quotas to the state at low prices
- Extracting surpluses out of the countryside to promote urban industry
Problems with planned economy
- Shortage economy: Demand constrained (market economy) vs. resource constrained (planned economy)
- System designed to maximize productive investments leads to wasteful use of resources
- Consumer austerity: rationing
How to deal with problems of the Soviet system?
- Scientific management: Reliance on stats, maths, and trained experts to perfect
- More reliance on market: End to input/output planning; greater autonomy to enterprise managers
- More politics in command; political mobilization
Instabilities in the socialist world
Nikita Khrushchev denounces Stalin
- Speech to 12th congress of Soviet Communist Party on Feb 25, 1956
- Stalin’s “mania for greatness” and “nauseatingly false” adulation disguised reality as incompetent leader and weak commander
Anti-rightist campaign
- Response to Poland and Hungary crises
- 300K+ intellectuals branded as “rightists”
- Parallel to rural collectivization and prelude to Great Leap Forward
Rural collectivization, continued
- Personal possessions – cookware, tables, etc. – turned over to communal mess halls
- No longer able to store and prepare own food
- Suspension of work points and rations
- Rapid expansion of rural bureaucracy: millions of new full-time cadres running communes, production brigades and teams
- Centralized control of resources previously in hands of households and villages
Production drive
- End of seasonal agriculture: Planting and harvest as busiest time; winter as slack time
- Constant and incessant demand on labor: Irrigation projects, road building, terracing of hillsides, small factories
- Diversion of labor away from agriculture led to poor production and harvest
- Militarization of rural life: All time and effort subject to campaign
Discuss: Mao’s remarks at the Beidaihe Conference, August 1958
- What should be the next stage of agricultural collectivization in China, according to Mao? Why?
- Explain: “The people’s communes have been set up as a result of the masses’ initiative; it wasn’t we who advocated it.”
Fake news, real famine
- Cycles of mutual deception and self-deception within bureaucracy
- Officials at all levels under pressure to agree and conform, especially in the wake of anti-rightist campaign
- Failure not an option: Hiding evidence, blocking negative reports, insisting on good news
- False claims about sabotage: Peasants hiding / hoarding grain, eating too much
- Country trapped by false reports of harvest
What the leaders knew
- Inflated numbers: Grain harvest in 1958
- Official figure: 375 million tons
- Actual figure: 200 million tons, 2.5% increase from previous year
- By April 1958: Widespread food shortages and riots
- By early 1959: Famine spreading nation-wide
Role play: Lushan Conference
| Character | Position |
|---|---|
| Mao Zedong | CCP Chairman |
| Peng Dehuai | Defense minister |
| Liu Shaoqi | President; successor to Mao |
| Zhou Enlai | Premier |
| Lin Biao | Politburo member; later defense minister |
Discuss: Peng Dehuai’s Letter
- What did the party do wrong?
- Who should take responsibility?
- Would you have written such a letter to Mao? Why or why not?
When policy debates become line struggles
- Political leaders opposed to “rash advance” as “right-wing opportunists”
- Balance, planning, economic laws as “superstition” and “dogmatism”
- “Politics in command”: Class conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat as main contradiction
- Support for leap policies as primary mark of political loyalty
- Real problem: not coercive extraction, but sabotage by class enemies
- From Anti-rightist Campaign to Great Leap Forward: Purge prevented course correction
Mao: Powerful yet powerless
- “Permanent revolution”: 1949 as only “the first step in the long march of the Chinese revolution”
- Despite unrestricted power, profound anxiety: How to prevent revolution from losing momentum?
- Desire for leadership: After Stalin, is the Soviet Union still a leader of the int’l communist movement?
Jisheng Yang, Tombstone: Excerpt
Mao believed some lies, and even when he was skeptical of others, it was to no avail. According to the memoirs of his personal secretary, Ye Zilong, at the outset, Mao believed the reports of “satellite launches,” and read the reports of exaggerated crop yields with genuine thoroughness, circling and underlining portions with a red pencil.
Jisheng Yang, Tombstone: Excerpt
Later on, he took note of many problems that emerged with the Great Leap Forward. He inspected many localities, and saw through some of the satellite launches and lies. On August 13, 1958, when Mao toured Tianjin’s Xinli Village, commune leaders claimed that a paddy field had yielded 50,000 kilos per mu.
Jisheng Yang, Tombstone: Excerpt
Mao said, “You’re exaggerating. That’s not possible, and you’re just shooting off your mouth. I’ve worked in the fields and you haven’t. That’s unreliable—50,000 kilos, I don’t believe it. You can’t even pile up that much grain!” The commune leaders told a child to go stand on top of the rice plants, but Mao said, “Child, don’t do it. The higher you stand, the harder you fall!”
Jisheng Yang, Tombstone: Excerpt
Mao was vexed at his lack of access to facts. One time, in Ye Zilong’s presence, he muttered, “Why won’t they tell me the truth? Why?”
Savants vs. Servants
- Nomenklatura system: Power, privilege, and party hierarchy as closely intertwined
- State service as intellectual ideal
- High costs of power: cadres dependent on party organization for livelihoods and privileges
- No alliterative to working for party-state: quitting as a sign of political wavering and breach of party discipline