1135 }
The Sino-Soviet Schism
THE R ACE TO COMMUNISM AND GREAT POWER STATUSInvestment Priorities and De-Stalinization
During the second half of the 1950s, there was a powerful interaction be-
tween China’s drive for socialist industrialization and its ties with the Soviet
Union and the United States. One driving factor was Mao’s determination
to substantially accelerate the pace of China’s industrialization.^1 This Great
Leap Forward, as Mao dubbed it, aimed to transform China into a leading
industrial and military power within a few years. This was to be achieved
by suppressing consumption, intensifying work effort, and pouring via com-
prehensive economic planning all possible resources into expansion of heavy
and defense industries. Under this Great Leap, the level of state investment
in industry would rise from 25 percent of total production in 1957 to 44 per-
cent in 1959—the latter being an extremely high rate of investment typically
seen in countries fighting a total war. Taking 1952 as a base year of 100, heavy
industrial production rose from 311 in 1957 to 823 in 1959, a 2.7-fold leap in two
years.^2 Mao’s push derived from his ingestion of Stalin’s economic thinking
via the Short Course, plus a deepening rivalry with CPSU leader Nikita
Khrushchev for leadership of the world communist movement. The Great
Leap Forward was Mao’s challenge to Khrushchev’s effort to de-Stalinize
socialism and achieve “peaceful coexistence” with the United States.
Mao understood that this forced march to industrialization would impose
hardship on the Chinese people. But he imagined that several years of “hard
struggle” would usher China into a new era of power and relative wealth.
The actual results were very different. As scholar Frank Dikötter has shown,
Chinese society devolved into what was probably the greatest famine in
modern history, with perhaps 45 million people dying from famine. Chinese
society disintegrated into a war of all against all in a desperate struggle for
survival.^3 A central element of Mao’s effort to herd China’s people into the