The pressures behind the dramatic inauguration in 1958 of “Three Red Banners”—i.e., the general line of socialist construction, the Great Leap Forward, and the rural people’s communes—are still not fully known. Undoubtedly, a complex mixture of forces came into play. Mao personally felt increasingly uncomfortable with the alliance with the Soviet Union and with the social and political ramifications of the Soviet model of development. On ideological grounds and because it shifted policy away from his personal political strengths, Mao disliked the Soviet system of centralized control by large government ministries, substantial social stratification, and strong urban bias. In addition, the Soviet model assumed that agricultural surplus need only be captured by the government and made to serve urban development. This was true for the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, when the model was developed, but the situation in China was different. Chinese policy had to devise a way first to create an agricultural surplus and then to take a large part of it to serve urban growth. The Soviet model also rested on implicit assumptions about the energy and transportation sectors that were not compatible with the Chinese realities of the 1950s.

To some extent, obscure political battles also became caught up in the debates over Chinese development strategies. In the spring of 1958, for example, Mao Zedong elevated Marshal Lin Biao to a higher position in the CCP than that held by Defense Minister Peng Dehuai. At the same time, Mao initiated a critique of China’s slavish copying of Soviet military strategy.

Overall, the radicalization of policy that led to the Great Leap Forward can be traced back to the anti-rightist campaign of 1957 and a major meeting of China’s leaders at the resort city of Qingdao in October of that year. By the time of another central meeting—this one in Nanning in January 1958—Mao felt confident enough to launch a blistering critique of the domination of economic policy by the State Council and its subordinate ministries. The best available evidence suggests that almost all the top leaders supported Mao as he developed a series of initiatives that eventually produced the Great Leap strategy and the people’s communes. The only major exceptions appear to have been Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun, a force in Chinese economic policy; both faded from the public eye in 1958 only to be brought back into active roles as the Great Leap faltered in 1959.

The general line of socialist construction and the Great Leap Forward were announced at the second session of the Eighth Party Congress (May 1958), which concentrated as much on political slogans as on specific objectives. Special emphasis was placed on political guidance by party cadres of the country’s scientists and technicians, who were viewed as potentially dangerous unless they would become fully “Red and expert.” The progressive indoctrination of experts would be paralleled by introductory technical training for cadres, thereby in theory transforming the entire elite into political-technical generalists. The Congress of 1958 called for a bold form of ideological leadership that could unleash a “leap forward” in technical innovation and economic output. To link the new generalist leaders and the masses, emphasis fell on sending cadres to the lower levels (xiafang) for firsthand experience and manual labor and for practical political indoctrination.

The Great Leap Forward involved an enormous amount of experimentation. It had no detailed blueprint, but there were some underlying strategic principles. There was a general reliance on a combination of ideological and organizational techniques to overcome seemingly insuperable obstacles that was focused on the countryside and that drew from policies of the 1930s and ’40s. The basic idea was to convert the massive labor surplus in China’s hinterlands into a huge production force through a radical reorganization of rural production. The search for the best organizational form to achieve this result led in August 1958 to popularization of the “people’s commune,” a huge rural unit that pooled the labor of tens of thousands of peasants from different villages in order to increase agricultural production, engage in local industrial production, enhance the availability of rural schooling, and organize a local militia force in accordance with Mao’s preferred national military strategy of combining the deterrence of an atomic bomb with guerrilla warfare.

Mao believed that through these radical organizational changes, combined with adequate political mobilization techniques, the Chinese countryside could be made to provide the resources both for its own development and for the continuing rapid development of the heavy industrial sector in the cities. Through this strategy of “walking on two legs,” China could obtain the simultaneous development of industry and agriculture and, within the urban sector, of both large- and small-scale industry. If it worked, this would resolve the dilemma of an agricultural bottleneck that had seemed to loom large on the horizon as of 1957. It would, however, involve a major departure from the Soviet model, which would predictably lead to increased tensions between Beijing and Moscow.

Largely because of unusually good weather, 1958 was an exceptionally good year for agricultural output. But, by the end of that year, the top CCP leadership sensed that some major problems demanded immediate attention. Initial optimism had led farmers in many areas to eat far more than they usually would have, and stocks of grain for the winter and spring months threatened to fall dangerously low. In addition, reports of sporadic unrest cast some doubt on the rosy picture being presented to the leaders by their own statistical system, the accuracy of which in turn came into question.

The fall harvest of 1958 had not been as large as expected, and in February and March 1959 Mao Zedong began to call for appropriate adjustments to make policies more realistic without abandoning the Great Leap as a whole. Mao emerged as one of the most-forceful advocates of scaling back the Great Leap in order to avert a potential disaster. He faced substantial resistance from provincial CCP leaders, whose powers had been greatly increased as part of the Great Leap strategy. A meeting at Lushan in the summer of 1959 produced an unanticipated and ultimately highly destructive outcome. Defense Minister Peng Dehuai raised a range of criticisms of the Great Leap, based in large part on his own investigations. He summed these up in a letter that he sent to Mao during the conference. Mao waited eight days to respond to the letter and then attacked Peng for “right deviationism” and demanded the purge of Peng and all his followers.

The Lushan Conference resulted in several major decisions: Peng Dehuai was replaced as defense minister by Lin Biao (who would later be marked for succession to Mao’s position of CCP chairman), the Great Leap Forward was scaled back, and a political campaign was launched to identify and remove all “rightist” elements. The third decision effectively canceled the second, as party officials refused to scale back the Great Leap for fear of being labeled as “rightists.” The net effect was to produce a “second leap”—a new radical upsurge in policy that was not corrected until it produced results so disastrous that they called into question the very viability of the communist system.

The CCP celebrated the 10th anniversary of national victory in October 1959 in a state of near euphoria. The weather turned in 1959, however, and during the next two years China experienced a severe combination of floods and drought. Although the economy was in serious trouble by mid-1960, the Chinese leaders sharpened their debate with Moscow. In April 1960, on the occasion of Vladimir Lenin’s 90th birthday, for example, Beijing published an article that contained a slightly veiled critique of Soviet foreign policy, arguing that the Soviets had become soft on imperialism. Khrushchev reacted with a rapid withdrawal of all Soviet technicians and assistance that July. (When he quietly offered to return them that November, his offer was refused.)

Despite the importance of these difficulties, China’s worst problem was bad policy. The people’s communes were too large to be effective, they ignored age-old marketing patterns in the countryside, and they required administrative and transport resources that did not exist. Their structure and means of allocating resources removed almost all incentive to work, and the breakdown in the statistical system meant that the top leaders had grossly erroneous ideas about what was occurring. Thus, even after many rural areas were beset by massive starvation, the orders from above continued to demand large-scale procurement of foodstuffs. The rural cadres were so afraid of being branded rightist that they followed these unrealistic orders, thus deepening the famine. By 1961 the rural disaster caught up with the cities, and urban industrial output plummeted by more than 25 percent. As an emergency measure, nearly 30 million urban residents were sent back to the countryside because they could no longer be fed in the cities. The Great Leap Forward had run its course, and the system was in crisis.