The Great Leap Forward Famine and Chairman Mao's Catastrophe

Denied entry into the U.S.-dominated global economy, in the middle of 1958, less than one decade after seizing national state power through a rural-based insurgency, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) initiated a political campaign known as the Great Leap Forward. Aimed at promoting self-reliant economic growth and building a modern competitive state through rapid industrial development and the collectivization of agriculture, this campaign also was driven by Mao's desire to pilot a great leap from socialism to communism, an ideological goal that had implications for policy implementation and ultimately stoked fanaticism at all levels of governance. In the end, the Great Leap fell short of its economic and political goals and spawned a disaster in the Chinese countryside.

Mao Zedong and other key members of the Central Party Committee were forewarned of the disaster. Between mid-August and late October 1958, they received written petitions from rural farmers in Henan province. The petitions, some of which were penned by members of the Communist Youth League, pleaded with central party politicians to correct problems created by cadres in charge of the Great Leap locally. An August 11 petition addressed to Tan Zhenlin, who had fought under Mao's command in Hunan during the late 1920s and on whom Mao relied to push his rural policies in the Great Leap, complained that party cadres were falsely overreporting the harvest output so they could justify appropriating more of the food crop for the party-state and thereby achieve greater glory in the eyes of their superiors.