The Great Leap Forward & the Cultural Revolution

From the First Five-Year Plan to Utopian Acceleration

The Great Leap Forward (大跃进, 1958-1962) marked Mao Zedong's abandonment of the Soviet-modelled First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957), which had prioritised heavy industry under central planning. Launched at the second session of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958 under the slogan 'going all out, aiming high, and achieving greater, faster, better, and more economical results' (多快好省), the Leap sought to overtake Britain in steel output within fifteen years and to telescope the transition to communism.

People's Communes and the Backyard Furnaces

The rural People's Communes (人民公社), formalised after the August 1958 Beidaihe Conference, amalgamated collectives into vast units that abolished private plots, established communal mess halls, and militarised labour. By the end of 1958 roughly 99 percent of peasant households had been enrolled in some 26,000 communes. The drive for steel produced the notorious 'backyard furnaces' (土法炼钢), which consumed household tools and timber to yield largely unusable pig iron. Cadres, fearing the fate of 'rightists' purged in the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, inflated grain reports massively; the state then requisitioned grain against these phantom harvests.

The Great Famine and the Lushan Conference

The result was the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), among the deadliest in recorded history, with demographic estimates of excess deaths ranging from roughly 15 million to over 30 million; scholar Yang Jisheng's 'Tombstone' (墓碑, 2008) argues for around 36 million. At the Lushan Conference in July-August 1959, Defence Minister Peng Dehuai submitted a private letter criticising the Leap's excesses; Mao construed this as a factional attack, dismissed Peng, and launched a renewed anti-rightist push that prolonged the catastrophe.

Retreat and the Seeds of Conflict

From 1960-1962 pragmatists Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping engineered a partial retreat—restoring private plots, contracting output to households in some areas, and dismantling the mess halls. At the 'Seven Thousand Cadres Conference' of January 1962, Liu Shaoqi attributed the disaster to 'three parts natural disaster, seven parts man-made.' Mao, sidelined economically, resented this implicit rebuke. The Leap's failure thus fractured the leadership and set the stage for Mao's recapture of initiative through ideological campaigns—the Socialist Education Movement of 1963 and, ultimately, the Cultural Revolution. Candidates should grasp the causal chain: utopian targets, falsified statistics, coercive requisition, famine, elite division, and Maoist counter-attack.

Launching the Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (无产阶级文化大革命, 1966-1976) was Mao Zedong's campaign to reassert ideological control, purge 'capitalist roaders,' and prevent the bureaucratic ossification he perceived in the post-Leap recovery. Its proximate trigger was Yao Wenyuan's November 1965 attack on Wu Han's play 'Hai Rui Dismissed from Office,' read as veiled criticism of Mao. The 'May 16 Notification' of 1966 and the Central Committee's August 1966 'Sixteen Points' (十六条) formally launched the movement.

Red Guards, the Gang of Four, and Mass Violence

Mobilised youth formed the Red Guards (红卫兵), who from August 1966 attacked the 'Four Olds' (四旧: old customs, culture, habits, ideas) and persecuted teachers, intellectuals, and officials. Mao reviewed millions at Tiananmen rallies in 1966. Power seizures, factional armed struggles (武斗), and the chaos of 1967 forced the deployment of the People's Liberation Army; Revolutionary Committees replaced Party and state organs. Liu Shaoqi, branded 'China's Khrushchev,' was purged and died in detention in 1969. The radical 'Gang of Four' (四人帮)—Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen—drove cultural policy.

The Lin Biao Affair and the End

Defence Minister Lin Biao, enshrined as Mao's successor in the 1969 Ninth Party Congress constitution, allegedly plotted a coup and died in a plane crash over Mongolia on 13 September 1971—a shock that corroded the movement's legitimacy. From 1972 Zhou Enlai and the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping pursued limited normalisation. The Cultural Revolution formally ended with Mao's death on 9 September 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four on 6 October 1976.

The Party's Verdict

The authoritative judgment is the CCP's 'Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the PRC,' adopted at the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee on 27 June 1981. It declared the Cultural Revolution 'responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic,' attributing it to Mao's errors while preserving his overall standing (the '70 percent right, 30 percent wrong' formulation). For the Guokao, this Resolution is the canonical text: memorise its date, its body, and its precise wording, because official examinations test the orthodox historical line, not historiographical debate.

Why This Matters for the Exam

In the Guokao (国考) the modern-history component sits within the Public Subject Test (公共科目), principally the Administrative Aptitude Test's 常识判断 (common-sense judgment) section and, for many ministries, the政治理论/党史 knowledge increasingly emphasised since the 2021 centenary 'Party history learning' campaign. Examiners reward candidates who reproduce the official historiography—the line set by the 1981 Resolution and reaffirmed in the November 2021 Third Historical Resolution—rather than Western academic estimates.

How It Is Tested

Expect single-best-answer items pinning exact dates and bodies: the 1958 Beidaihe Conference, the 1959 Lushan Conference, the 1962 Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, the 1966 Sixteen Points, the 13 September 1971 Lin Biao incident, the 9 September 1976 death of Mao, and the 6 October 1976 arrest of the Gang of Four. Matching and sequencing questions chain these into a timeline. The 申论 (Shenlun) essay rarely treats these traumas directly but may invoke the lesson 'seeking truth from facts' (实事求是) as a governance principle—the corrective Deng drew from the era.

High-Yield Facts to Retain

Retain: (1) the Great Leap slogan 多快好省 and the 1958 communes; (2) Peng Dehuai's 1959 dismissal at Lushan; (3) Liu Shaoqi's 'three parts natural, seven parts man-made' verdict of 1962; (4) the Gang of Four's four members; (5) the 27 June 1981 Resolution's exact characterisation of the Cultural Revolution as the 'most severe setback' and its preservation of Mao's legacy. The PYQ pattern favours the Resolution's date and the Gang of Four's composition; these are perennial 常识 staples. Distinguish the Great Leap (an economic-utopian catastrophe, 1958-62) from the Cultural Revolution (a political-ideological purge, 1966-76)—conflating them is the commonest candidate error.