140 China in World History
land. But the economy was not growing fast enough to satisfy Mao, and
he was disturbed by what he saw as a growing gap between the urban
industrial economy and the rural agricultural one. He was frustrated
that China’s private plots (only 10 percent of the land) were producing
much more than 10 percent of its agricultural product, suggesting that
people had not really learned the beauty and utility of collectivization.
Mao was also growing increasingly impatient with China’s Soviet part-
ner, particularly after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced
Stalin (who died in 1953) at a Soviet Congress in 1956. This was easily
interpreted in Beijing as an attack on Mao.
Thus, in 1958 Mao announced a new campaign, the Great Leap
Forward, which he promised would launch China into the leading ranks
of the industrialized world within a few years. The Chinese Communist
Party moved to collectivize agriculture completely, abolishing all pri-
vate plots, and called for the self-industrialization of the countryside by
the peasants themselves. Rural cadres mobilized peasants in the winter
months to build dams, roads, irrigation canals, and terraced fi elds. They
directed peasants to make their own machinery, to smelt steel in their
own backyard furnaces—to industrialize the nation from the bottom
up all at once.
To further increase economic effi ciency, all women were freed from
the cooking of meals by having everyone eat in mass cafeterias. Child
care likewise was completely collectivized, freeing more mothers for
productive labor. Peasants had to hand over all their own draft animals
to the collective. Soviet leaders were so horrifi ed by the madness of
the Great Leap Forward and its implicit criticism of the Soviet model
that they withdrew all Soviet aid from China, and the 10,000 Russian
engineers and scientists returned to the Soviet Union, taking their plans,
blueprints, and technical expertise with them. Mao soon denounced the
Soviet Union as bitterly as he denounced the United States.
The Great Leap Forward is a textbook example of how badly a
dictatorship can go wrong when it believes its own propaganda and
all criticism is forbidden. The Party organization was so strong and
so all-pervasive in society that no one could safely call attention to the
unrealistic goals and promises of the Great Leap Forward. Everyone
was pressured to work longer hours and to increase production. Since
no one could admit that this was madness, every local leader did his
duty and reported increases in annual production in 1958. Since the
state based its own allotment of the crop on reported yields, it took
more and more of the harvest for urban areas, leaving rural villages
with little to eat.