Between 1949 and 1978, the Chinese government started to adopt a new inward-directed development strategy following by the Soviet Union which is called ‘ Leap Forward’ or ‘ Big Push’. This period is known as the socialist era. The aim was to channel the maximum feasible investment into heavy industry and the Chinese government can control the whole domestic economy. In order to be able to implement this strategy, a planned economic system was established between 1949 and 1956. This system enables a huge amount of capital to be invested in the heavy industry (in such economy that is characterized by scarcity of capital) and makes sure these industries would be run beneficially and practicably in the long term, even though it conflicts with the …show more content…
Under the direction of central planning, a production plan was required and needed to be approved by the State Planning Commission, a deputy department that was responsible for economic planning. In a production plan, three key elements should be included. They were labour, materials and output. After reporting the plan, the administrative bureau would issue planning targets to each state-owned industrial enterprise. For the First Lathe Factory, it received planning targets for different aspects annually, apart from the output target, which was quarterly. This central plan is a way to secure which Party and socialist ownership could completely manipulate the management. Therefore, all the decisions were made by political authorities. In the period of the Great Leap Forward was launched, the situation went worse via factories being overoptimistic and exaggeratedly set a unrealistic target for a plan. Instead of farming, farmers were asked to cut downs trees to provide fuels for steel making. Food production dramatically fell down. In the end, the results tuned out that one quarter of the targeted production fell short in a certain period. A wastage occurred. Not only the targeted production failed to reach, the people also suffered from the one of the most serious famines in the Chinese history. According to the statistics, around fifty million people died in this tragedy. Chinese now refer this era as “the three years of natural disaster”. In this case, it embodies how inexperienced and immature the central planning system was. China was aiming to take over England and America and wanting to become the world’s leading country whereas they were being too anxious. There was no realistic basis for the plan. Everyone wanted to compete with others using fake figures and directly lead to that miserable incident. After 1958, in the operation of an industrial
Following the Chinese Revolution of 1949, China’s economy was in ruin. The new leader, Mao Zedong, was responsible for pulling the economy out of the economic depression. The problems he faced included the low gross domestic product, high inflation, high unemployment, and high prices on goods. In order to solve these issues, Mao sought to follow a more Marxist model, similar to that of the Soviet Union. This was to use government intervention to develop industry in China. In Jan Wong’s Red China Blues, discusses Maoism and how Mao’s policies changed China’s economy for the worse. While some of Mao’s early domestic policies had some positive effects on China’s economy, many of his later policies caused China’s economy to regress.
Deng Xiaoping felt that the quickest way to build a better China was to improve living conditions immediately, to give people the level of morale they need for further development. At that time, he realized that China’s economic need to reform; he found very effective ways to reform the China’s economic. His goals were to open up the China’s market to the outside world, breaking down the collective farms, getting rid of state-run enterprises and providing more jobs for people in the industry. He found that the most important thing was the modernization of agriculture because 80% of the population derived their living primarily from agricultural production. The new contract responsibility system allowed farmers to rent land for individual farming families. Farmers had to sell a certain percentage of their crops to the State with the State’s price, and they could sell the remaining for their own profits. This system had helped the rural income to be doubled (Benson, 47). It marked a successful modernization of agricultural.
This was a program which called for major steel production. Mao Zedong wanted to make China a “first-class modern power”(221). Mao wanted the steel production of the country to double in only one year, as he called on the whole population to help. All other work and schooling stopped. There was a new quota for each unit to produce.
Westerners perceive the Chinese as a lower race, but supple to the purpose of industrial exploitation (Hobson 313). Chinese labour workers have a larger surplus product of labour in comparison to the cost of keep. Their labour power described by Westerners was by far richer than the price of gold and silver deposits (Hobson 313). The Western industrial method is composed of three stages. The first stage is the ordinary commerce, which is the exchange of normal surplus between two countries (Hobson 313). The second stage is acquiring territory, or investing capital on a foreign country in order to connect to resources such as imports (Hobson 313). The third stage is when organizing energy is developed within a country. Westerners wanted to apply the stages to China, investing on their labour power (Hobson 313). China would be a phenomenal labour market if they added a railroad system (Hobson 313). This would have spare capital and development of business energy and supply European countries and the United States for many generations (Hobson
The primary political goal was to change ideologies of the people from imperialism to communism through techniques such as thought reforms and re-education campaigns that urged people to believe in Mao’s vision of China and socialist ways of thinking, working and living by dedicating themselves to ‘serve the people’ instead of their own self-interest. From 1949, Mao established a communist political system influenced by Marxism, which was altered slightly over the years but still remaining the kind of system he wanted. However, changes made by leaders such as Deng Xiaoping after The Great Leap Forward introduced new right-wing capitalist policies, such as the encouragement of private markets, which would allow the Chinese economy to recover from The Great Leap Forward. These measures were sustained as the policies proved to increase productivity and growth. This threatened Mao’s views of the kind of socialist society he aimed to create and so he and the Communist Part of China (CCP) launched the 1966 Cultural Revolution to bring China back to its ‘pure’ socialist system. From this, it can be seen that Mao’s political goals of the 1949 Communist Revolution were achieved to some extent as a communist system was established. His goal, however, was not achieved to a full extent as changes made by Deng Xiaoping in 1966, changed his creation of a ‘pure’ communist system into a socialist system economically powered by
Further problems for the implementation of Great Leap Forward can be classified as unintended and intended. An unintended problem was the natural disaster, a famine, which loomed China in 9159 to 1961. This disrupted Mao's reforms because people were starving and the Great leap Forward was not succeeding was not succeeding. An intended problem was the stop of aid from the Soviet Union in its provision of finance and industrial material, namely steel, to China. It was not that Mao literally intended for such a problem to arise. Rather, it was a problem that could have prevented if Mao maintained important diplomatic ties with communism ally, Soviet Union.
Soon after the rise of Mao Zedong and the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the CCP began instituting revolutionary reforms in the Soviet style to increase mass economic efficiency. The first FYP proved largely successful in increasing production and establishing greater industry. Motivated by these previous achievements, Maoist optimism pioneered the social and economic movement recognized as the “Great Leap Forward.” However, due to adverse climatic conditions, poor management, and a lack of technological expertise, famine consumed China in 1958 and 1960, when the GLF was in full effect.
Finally, the 21st century defines a major devolution of the communist ideology as a mere symbol in the extreme forms of capitalist enterprise defined under the guise of “state power.” Mao had a negative impact on the Chinese economy by giving the state too much power to make decisions, which ultimately conform to neo-liberal economic ideologies that exploit the Chinese proletariat. Much like the great Leap Forward killed 45 million workers in the late 1950s, so does the current mode of economic development in an increasingly stratified class divisions centered in urban
The Great Leap Forward was a socioeconomic plan held from 1958 to 1961 by Communist party of China. As a result of successful economic reconstruction that had taken place in the early 1950s, the First Five Year Plan, Mao Zedong wanted to launch the second Five Year Plan, which was the Great Leap Forward. It was aimed to change China’s agrarian economy into an industrialized and socialist society. Mao had a vision of surpassing the Soviet Union and the United States in a short period of time. The two primary tasks that Mao thought was the most important were industry and agriculture.
These views include citing mass killings of upwards of 30 million, and China’s failure to recover from the famine, all of which are incorrect. In an effort to defame the Great Leap Forward movement, many historians argue that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for taking the lives of 20-30 million; however, Dr. Ping-ti Ho, a Chinese expert of demography cites the numerous flaws in the census of 1959-1960 and concludes that the reported 20-30 million people killed never truly existed. This claim is supported by the census and proves that the estimated death toll is far from the truth. In fact, the death toll amounts to a total of 1-2 million casualties roughly, far from what many acclaimed historians claim. In addition, many detractors adduce that the Chinese economy never recovered from the famine during the Great Leap Forward, and consequently led to bloody revolutions. However, once again this claim is tainted with erroneous information as there was never a struggle to recuperate and the revolution that took place was not violent, but quite the opposite. The Chinese economy was indeed distraught after the famine during the Great Leap Forward movement, however the Chinese government was quick to rebuild their fragmented economy into a prosperous one as early as 1970, and were
From the 1970s, there has been a wave of liberalization in China, which was introduced by Deng Xiaoping. This is one of the key reasons to the rise of China to be one of the economic giants in the world. In the last 25 years of the century, the Chinese economy has had massive economic growth, which has been 9.5 percent on a yearly basis. This has been of great significance of the country since it quadrupled the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country thus leading to saving of 400 million of their citizens from the threats of poverty. In the late 1970s, China was ranked twentieth in terms of trade volumes in the whole world as well as being predicted to be the world’s top nation concerning trading activities (Kaplan, 53). This further predicted the country to record the highest GDP growth in the whole world.
Today’s China is perceived as an economic powerhouse and a seriousl player in Asia and more broadly in the international arena. However, China’s path to both economic and political prominence has been long and tortuous.The Great Leap Forward was an attempt to modernize China economy so that by 1988, China would have an economy that rivaled America. The “Great Leap Forward” was a setback to China instead of an economy booster. The main reason this atrocity occurred was the advancement of China economy. The ‘‘Civil War’’ generated economic devastation. It also displaced the majority of Chinese people from their residency into a series of communes. Political decisions/beliefs took precedence over common sense and communes faced the task of doing things which they were incapable of achieving. Party officials would order the impossible and commune leaders, who knew what their commune was capable of doing or not, could be charged with being a "bourgeois reactionary" if he complained. Such a charge would lead to prison. Peasants were a huge part of this major atrocity and they were treated poorly. Food was scarce and declined rapidly during the “Great Leap Forward”." The Great Leap Forward was aimed at accomplishing the economic and technical development of the country at a vastly faster pace and with greater results. People did anything and everything to survive. The Great Leap Forward is one of the biggest genocides to date 20 to 30 million people died. My project is on my opinion of how I feel about the great leap forward in my own words.
When the new Chinese Government was set up in 1949, the new government faced a lot of problems. First on their agenda was how to re-build the country. As Communist Party of China (CPC) is a socialist party, their policies at the time were similar to that of the Soviet Union’s. Consequently, the CPC used a centrally planned strategy as its economic strategy when it first began. For a long time, the Chinese economy was a centrally planned economy in which none other than the state owned all companies. In fact, there were absolutely no entrepreneurs. As time went on, the problems of a centrally planned economy started to appear, such as low productivity, which was the key reason for restricting the development of China. With the population growing, the limitations of the centrally planned economy were clear. In 1978 China started its economic reform whose goal was to generate sufficient surplus value to finance the modernization of the Chinese economy. In the beginning, in the late 1970s and early 19...
Prior to the Cultural Revolution, the economic movement forwarded by Mao Zedong known as the Great Leap Forward took place from 1958 to 1960. The goal in this campaign was to modernize and industrialize China. After some degree of success in his Five Year Plan such as the increase in production of iron and coal, Mao further sought for his utopian socialist ideas by placing China’s great labor force into large collective farms called communes. However, since all factors of production benefited only the government, the peasants lost their enthusiasm toward working. As a result, agricultural failure led to famine, w...
China and Russia's approach to change are vastly different, almost like night and day. China's political and economic policy has always been to do things gradually. Whereas Russia believed in going through the necessary changes quickly, so that the hardship would in turn pass just as quickly. In the implementation of their policies, we have seen that China's approach has led to a 29% of growth in their industrial field. But in comparison, Russia only yielded 15% with their approach. But one must keep in mind that China has more industrial sectors than does Russia, so their job in improving industry is notably easier than Russia's feat in developing an industry.