"Great Leap Forward" Movement

A socialist construction movement with high speed as its soul was launched to rapidly change the face of poverty and backwardness in China, which was also a serious setback in exploring the road of China's socialist construction. The "Great Leap Forward" movement was launched in the process of criticizing anti-adventurous progress and conceiving and formulating the general line of socialist construction.

Mao Zedong was not satisfied with the slogan of "more speed, better savings", which was no longer mentioned after the anti-adventurous progress campaign in 1956. The rapid growth of production in some factories and rural areas during the Rectification Campaign made Mao more convinced that anti-rash-advance campaign was wrong. At the Third Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee held in 1957, Mao Zedong not only changed the judgment of the First Session of the Eighth National Congress of the Party on the main contradictions of our society, but also changed the policy of the congress on being both anti-conservative and anti-rash-advance in economic construction.

In May 1958, the Second Session of the Eighth National Congress of the Party formally adopted the general line of "going all out, aiming high and achieving greater, faster, better and more economical results in building socialism". Although the starting point of this general line was to change the country's economic and cultural backward situation as quickly as possible, it was simply impossible to rapidly change the situation because of ignoring the objective economic laws. After the general line was proposed, the Party launched the "Great Leap Forward" campaign. The main symbols were the unilateral pursuit of the high speed of industrial and agricultural production and construction, and the continuous and substantial improvement and revision of the planned indicators.

The slogan of "taking grain production as the key link" was put forward in agriculture, requiring that the grain production targets set in the 12-year agricultural development program be met in five, three, or even one or two years. In industry, the slogan of "taking steel production as the key link" was put forward, requiring that the originally planned 15-year steel production target of catching up with or exceeding the UK’s production level should be achieved within seven, five or even three years ahead of schedule. It was proposed that the steel output in 1958 should double that in 1957, from 5.35 million tons to 10.7 million tons, and in 1959 should double that in 1958, from 10.7 million tons to 21 million tons, and strive to reach 30 million tons. The grain production in 1958 should be increased by 80% compared to1957, from 195 million tons to about 350 million tons, and in 1959 by 50% compared to 1958, from about 350 million tons to 525 million tons. Under such goals and slogans, the capital construction investment expanded dramatically. In three years, the total investment in capital construction (accumulation) was as high as 100.6 billion yuan, almost double the total investment in capital construction during the First Five-Year Plan. The capital accumulation rate suddenly soared, averaging as much as 39.1% per year over three years. At the same time, transportation, posts and telecommunications, education, culture, health, and other undertakings were also carried out for the whole nation, bringing the "Great Leap Forward" campaign to a climax. This led to the proliferation of high targets, blind commands, and exaggerations in economic construction.

Between November 1958 and July 1959, Mao Zedong and the Central Committee of the Party made efforts to correct the mistakes they had noticed and took a series of measures to reduce the industrial and agricultural production targets for 1959.

The Eighth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee wrongly criticized the so-called "Peng Dehuai Anti-Party Group". It was followed by the Party-wide "anti-rightist" struggle, which interrupted the efforts to correct the “Left” mistakes, while the “Left” mistakes within the Party developed even further. In 1960, it was proposed to maintain the "Great Leap Forward" for a long time, continue to demand that industrial and agricultural production reach unrealistically high targets, unfairly accuse the reduction of targets in the first half of 1959, and blindly emphasize the need to muster up energy and oppose the right deviation. In the winter of 1960, the Central Committee of the Party and Mao Zedong began to correct the “Left” mistakes in rural work, and the "Great Leap Forward" was stopped.

Mao Zedong and the Central Committee of the CPC, in order to change China's poor and backward situation as soon as possible and enable the people to lead a happy life, launched the "Great Leap Forward" movement with the subjective desire to seize a rare historical opportunity that emerged in the mid-1950s, which was conducive to domestic peacebuilding, and to create a leap forward in China's socialist construction. At the beginning of the "Great Leap Forward", the broad masses of the people actively supported the movement and spared no effort to realize the great leap forward. However, this movement violated the principle of seeking truth from facts, the laws of economy and nature, and was bound to pay a heavy price. As pointed out in the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China”, which was adopted by the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee: “This was due to our lack of experience in socialist construction and inadequate understanding of the laws of economic development and of the basic economic conditions in China, and more importantly, it was due to the fact that Comrade Mao Zedong and many leading comrades, both at the center and in the localities, had become smug about their successes, were impatient for quick results and overestimated the role of man’s subjective will and efforts, and after the general line was formulated, the “Great Leap Forward and the movement for rural people’s communes were initiated without careful investigation and study and without prior experimentation, however, ‘Left’ errors, characterized by excessive targets, the issuing of arbitrary directions, boastfulness and the stirring up of a ‘communist wind’, spread unchecked throughout the country.”