to increasing productivity and correcting the agri-
cultural backwardness. This new line, which was
intended to help China catch up with the West,
required more individual enterprise, encouraged
in part by the provision of incentives. Students and
intellectuals, cowed by previous campaigns against
them, were now wooed. Deng Xiaoping, one of
Mao’s rising lieutenants, advocated more worker
participation in management as one way of
increasing productivity. This, in the Chinese defi-
nition, was greater participation – always subject,
though, to the leadership of the party.
In February 1957 Mao delivered a speech ‘On
the Correct Handling of Contradictions among
People’. One passage in particular received wide-
spread publicity for its apparent espousal of
freedom of ideas among the scientific and intel-
lectual community – ‘letting a hundred flowers
blossom and a hundred schools of thought
contend’. But what seemed to the West to be a
move towards tolerance and plurality was no more
than a tactical device, a means to an end, the per-
ceived precondition for what became known as
the Great Leap Forward. It encouraged China’s
intellectuals and was meant to act as a restraint
on party bureaucracy at the local level. Freedom
of thought would not, however, be allowed to
challenge central control and leadership.
During the winter of 1957 and into the spring
of 1958, 60 million peasants were put to work on
water-conservancy constructions to aid agricul-
ture. Mass human power was to be used in place
of more advanced technology to achieve quick
results. At the same time as plans for the Great
Leap Forward were implemented, a purge of
intellectuals was begun in a bewildering reversal
of the previous year. The pendulum had thus
swung once more. Mao intervened to pronounce
a new line after watching the turmoil of destalin-
isation in Poland and Hungary in 1956; this was
called the Anti-Rightist campaign. The ‘hundred
flowers’ had blossomed for little more than one
season. In every factory 5 per cent of the workers
had to be denounced as ‘rightists’ and subjected
to a witch-hunt. Up to 700,000 ‘intellectuals’, or
educated Chinese, were thrown out of their posi-
tions and professions and sent to the countryside
for so-called labour reform. The contempt for the
intellectuals, the need to control and subjugate
them, now took precedence over China’s desper-
ate need for their skills. It was easy to treat them
harshly as they were isolated from China’s masses
of peasants and workers. Denunciation by family,
friends, colleagues and fellow workers, which
inevitably sowed distrust, was one of the party’s
most effective means of control. Abroad, China’s
softer line cooperating with a neutral Third
World, exemplified by the Bandung Conference
in 1955 and the stance of ‘peaceful coexistence’,
was followed by increased militancy and self-
assertion. In 1958 China’s relations with Taiwan
reached a new crisis-point, and on India’s border
in 1959 there were armed clashes.Mao’s faith that the ideologically motivated peas-
ants and workers could overcome all obstacles,
that the grassroot masses were what mattered, not
the professionals and intellectuals, found practical
expression in what party propaganda described as
the Great Leap Forward – actually two leaps, in
1958 and 1959–60. They proved an unmitigated
disaster for the Chinese economy and people.
In the countryside the people’s cooperatives
were merged into huge communes under ideo-
logical local party leadership. They now com-
prised not only agriculture but also grass-roots
industrial units. Unrealistic production targets
were set. Now not only would steel be smelted in
the new modern mills, but iron would be pro-
duced in small peasant furnaces. Chaos ensued:
industrial production declined and agricultural
output dropped by a quarter. A renewed ‘leap’ in
1959 and 1960 resulted in further disastrous agri-
cultural and industrial losses. In the first quarter
of 1961 alone output of twenty-five key industrial
products dropped by between 30 and 40 per cent.
There was a chronic grain shortage as China’s
population increased, and famine became wide-
spread. More than 20 million people died.
After the failure of the Great Leap Forward,
Mao permitted a reformist party leadership to
follow policies at variance with his longer-term
objectives, because priority had to be given to
increase food supplies and resume industrial
growth – in other words, to repair the ravages of
the Great Leap Forward. Thus from 1960 to