Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward (大跃进) was an economic and social campaign launched by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong, formally adopted at the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958 and effectively ending around 1962. It sought to overtake British industrial output within fifteen years by mobilizing China's massive rural population for simultaneous agricultural and industrial transformation.

Key features included:

• People's communes: Roughly 26,000 large communes consolidated existing cooperatives, pooling land, labor, tools, and even private cooking into collective mess halls.
• Backyard furnaces: Millions of peasants were directed to produce steel in small, improvised furnaces, often melting down usable tools to meet quotas. Most output was unusable pig iron.
• Grain procurement and inflated reporting: Local cadres, pressured to demonstrate success, reported exaggerated harvest figures. The state then requisitioned grain based on those false numbers, leaving rural areas with severe shortages.
• Labor-intensive infrastructure: Massive irrigation and dam projects were undertaken with little engineering oversight.

The campaign produced one of the deadliest famines in recorded history. Scholarly estimates of excess deaths between 1959 and 1961 range widely, commonly cited between roughly 15 and 45 million; Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine (2010) argues for figures at the higher end, while Yang Jisheng's Tombstone (2008) estimates around 36 million.

At the Lushan Conference (July–August 1959), Defense Minister Peng Dehuai criticized the campaign in a private letter to Mao and was purged, deterring further internal dissent. By early 1962, at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, the policy was effectively wound down, and pragmatists such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping oversaw recovery measures. The failure damaged Mao's standing within the Party and is widely viewed as a precipitating factor in his launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.