Mao.Media, Propaganda, Cult of personality Video

Mao: The Great Leap Forward

http://www.slideshare.net/gabr0088/ib-history-the-great-leap-forward
(Great review of Great Leap forward/ the first 5 year plan a little too) 

Prelude to Great Leap Forward

• People losing "fire" of original revolution
• 1958- Mao said transition to socialism was complete and it was time for the transition to communism 
• Sino-Soviet relations strained and China wanted to prove 

"Three years of struggle, followed by 1000 years of Communist happiness"

• 1958-1963-Great Leap Forward (Second 5 year plan)
• Focus on development of agriculture and Heavy industry 
• Introduced with great fanfares 
• Quotas constantly changed, plucked from thin air (not  based on economic research)
• Stressed acts of faith in communism
• Goal: "To overcome all capatalist Countries in a fairly short time, and become one of the richest most advanced countries in the world" -Mao (Moscow 1957)

Why great leap was needed?

• SOviet Union rapidly advancing 
• Sputnik, 1957
• Soviet economic achievement 
• China wanted self reliance & its own economic/technological advancements 

Economic problems facing china in 1949

• Farming
• Small units of land
• No farm machinery or fertilizers (old fashioned methods)
• Many peasants would often leave their farm for military duties  
• Industry
• Years of war= widespread damage to industry
• outdated machines 
• Lack of investments 
• Infrastructure damaged 
• Inequalities between rich and poor

Mao's Reform plan in the Great Leap forward

• Industry: The "Backyard" Steel campaign
• Extreme Communist lifestyle
• Communes 
• Heavy Industry 
• Chemical Fertilizers 
• Cement
• Oil 
• Steel 
• Iron 
• Coal
• "Incentives" offered (food raitons, better apartment, better schools for kids, ect.) for workers who met quotas
• Mao wanted to achieve space exploration ("Lift off") in China
• Collectivized peasants would create a food surplus
• Surplus sold to pay for industry reform 
• Believed manpower war the key to industrial development 
• focus on big projects
• Believed that effort and output of each worker could be increased

 Mao's Efforts

• The Emperor of the Blues ants
• Thousands of Mechanical diggers
• all wore Blue uniforms  
• Helped construct  Bridges, Dams, Canals
• 1957-1959 Tienanmen Square Built
• Made to be bigger than Moscow's Red Square
• Ming Tombs reservoir outside Beijing
• Dug for half an hour 
• Propaganda stunt
• Two great (Figurative) soldiers 
• "General Steel"
• "General Grain"
• Backyard Furnaces: 
• National movement to build small furnaces in backyard
• Mao believed this would achieve goal of industrial development
• 100's of families made quotas for home-made steel
• Very low quality steel 
•  Home-made goods= unrecognizable blobs
• Steel unusable in any practical way
• lots of effort, little substance
• Huge environmental effort 
• Deforestation of China
• "Backyard furnaces" fueled environmental destruction 
• State Owned enterprises (SOE's)
• Notion of centrally controlled industry 
• No profit-making concerns
• No bargaining
• Wages, prices, quotas: all set by the state
• Total Government direction 
• Failure of SOE's
• Inefficient 
• SOE’s were given state subsidies
•  Workers received guaranteed wages
•  No motivation for managers or workers
•  No initiative 
• Payment the same
• Shi Man Tam Reservoir
•  25,000 Peasant workers
• Organized into "People's Communes" that ate, slept & worked together
• Workers exhausted from little food & long, intensive work days
• 1958- Good year for harvest 
• Resulted in Unrealistically high quotas for the next year 
• Enthusiastically embraced by commune officials 

Great Leap Forward- Communes

• Peasants organized into huge Communes (approx. 24,000 across China)
• They ate, slept, and worked together
• Commune officials took detailed noted on exactly who did what/ how much work
• State Quotas demanded of each commune 
• Individuals paid in "work points" 
• used at commune store for food, clothes, ect.
• "Amenities" 
• Canteen- fed everyone 
• nurseries- looked after children 
• "Happy Homes"- for the elderly
• 1958- All communes should produce steel via "backyard steel furnaces"
• Crop Expiramentation
• Lysenkoism- "close planting" was supposed to increase yield- it didn;t 
• Sparrowwide- they killed all the birds to get rid of crop predators, but then all the birds were dead and there were a lot of bugs 
• 1958 CCP conference at Wuhan
• Attempts to decrease radicalism in communes
• Re-establish the party's control over local officials  

Effects/ Problems of Great Leap Forward

"Three Bitter Years"

• Economic problems & Famine
• Communes did not meet grain quotas
• State still took promised amount of grain
• Little food left over for peasants to eat
• killed hundreds of thousands of people
• Cannibalism became an issue in the heart of famine stricken starvation 
• Droughts & Flood
• Destroyed much of the next 3 years of harvest ('59-'69)
• Fraudulence
• Even with bad harvests, commune officials reported high production levels to meet quotas
• Death Toll: Estimated: 20- 30 million in three years

1959 Lushan Planum
Peng De Huai's Opposition

• July 1959- CCP's central committee gathered @ Lushan for a conference to asses "Great Leap"
• Control of the PLA, Future of the communes, & Mao's 
• Mao addmited his mistakes and acknowledged his short fallings but did not change anything 
• Peng De  Huai
• "Old Revolutionary"
• commrade of Mao's for over 30 years
• respected soldier
• Minister of defense 
• He visited his home Provence of Hunan (next to Mao's Home province)
• Noted reality of the Great Leap Forwards
• Affected by poor conditions & Poverty
• Peng wrote private letter to Mao adressing issues
•  Mao copied letter, distributed to central party
• Peng denounced
• Mao threatened to go back into a civil war against opponents 
• Soviet denouncement of the great leap forward shortly after
•  Peng had recently visited the Soviet Union 
• Accusations that Peng was a soviet mole
• Stripped of office & exiled
• Lin Biao replaces Peng Duhuai 
• Mao steps back and does not make many decisions for a few years after this

Overview of great leap forwards and what happened next-

• Failure
• Nonetheless, after Lushan, Mao did nothing to correct the problems of the Great Leap. He withdrew from public life (resigning as President – or Chairman – of the PRC) and left his successor, Liu, and others to deal with the aftermath. The situation was also clearly worsened by the attitude of the state in promoting exaggerated targets, and collecting and selling grain needed by peasants.
• 1961 Mao resigns as chairman, leaving successor Liu in charge of the mess he created 
• . Did the Great Leap achieve anything?
•  Some successful flood and irrigation schemes were carried out as a result of the mass mobilisation of the Great Leap – although Jung Chang points out (“Mao: The Unknown Story”) that many of the reservoirs associated with these collapsed with disastrous consequences in later years. Women were brought into the work force for the first time – continuing the process of liberating women in China.
• What happened next? 
• With Mao’s withdrawal, the control of economic life fell to his colleagues – notably Liu Shaoqi (now president) and Deng Xiaoping. In 1962 they began restoring private plots to peasants Communes were substantially reduced down Factory and industrial workers saw bonuses and incentives restored to help boost production.
• The retrenchment policies were influenced considerably by the observations and reports of respected Politburo member Chen Yun, in summer 1961 (see Spence, p.559) However, as the party pursued retrenchment, it was also becoming apparent that many rural cadres were abusing their positions (Spence, p.560-561).
• The concerns over corruption coincided with Mao’s increasing restlessness at being on the sidelines – he complained of being treated “like a dead ancestor”. The Socialist Education Campaign, established in 1962, was to be the vehicle for rooting out corrupt practices. It also ended up containing the seeds of the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s return to supreme power.

Mao: 5 year plans

Economic

• 1953- first five year plan
• modeled after the Soviet Union 5 year plans
• focus on heavy industry 
•  Heavy industry increased- but an unknown amount 
• people lied about quotas
• USSR helped, but only 4% was a donation, the other aid came in the form of a loan- to be payed back at a very high interest rate 
• unemployment and poverty, esp. in the countryside did not get better 

politics:

• Proletariat loses power
• peasants are not as involved
• local party members lose voice & power 
• bureaucracy gets much bigger similar to Stalin's government 
• Mao does not like bureaucracy 
• Old revolutionary party members (who had been there from the beginning) lose power, voices not heard- against bureaucratization and focus on the old goal of giving power back to the proletariat  

Gao Gang case:

• he differed and was a traitor: purged
• Gaining to much power, eliminated him 
• people thought the committed suicide, he has purged
• split ties from Russia
• Suffran Case:
• Systematic purge of bureaucracy 
• driven by of the Goa gang case, suspicion rose that there may be more traitors within the party 
• Mao reestablishes power 

new class system in china

• New political parties 
•  political elites 
• technological elites
• proletariat grew (good, because the goal of the 5 year plan was to proletariatize)
• emphasis on science in school to help with future industrialization
• much lasrger gaps between the countryside and the city 
• people from the country thought people from the cities made so much more than them 

Hundred Flowers:

• Krustev denounced the cult of personality around Stalin
• these practices were also true of Mao
• Hundred Flowers Instituted in an attempt to de-stalinize and change 
• Needed his own intellectuals to rely on the implement the new economic policy
• In a way "falsely safe" basis for intelligentsia to come out 
• Scientist free of class association- free to talk about their work
• Artists were still closely regulated 
• People unsure about speaking out because in the past people had been persecuted for voicing their concern
• After expressing doubts about the bureaucracy, people started to critisize Mao- that was the end of the movement. 
• After realizing the policy was getting out of hand, critics punished  

Homework:

Great Leap Forward 214-239

New State in China, Mao Takes Power

Chapter 5
New State- Mao

• Chinese 1949 v. Russia 1917 (The State when the communists came to power)
• International Movement
• Russsians Beleived in an international movement
• Chinese (Mao) highly nationalistic, focused solely on China
• Authoritarian State- 
• -Russia: Betrayal of original revolutionary ideals
• +China: the plan from the beginning in order to tackle China's economic/ political problems 
• Mao "One People's Democratic Dictatorship"- Outlined his ideology
• Leaders
• -Russia: Few strong leaders, changing ideology
• +China: Already well established gov't, tested ideology, clear established administrators
• Popular Support
• -Russia: Proletariat support, lots against party, little support in the countryside/ peasantry
• +China: , High popular support- especially with rural peasantry (Proletariat not particularly politically active)
• Isolation
• -Russia, first communist state- isolated from international stage
• +China, Followed Russian Rev.- the existence of another large communist state provided security (even if they had essentially broken ties with Moscow) 
• Backwardness
• +Prevalent in Russia, fairly established economy- in a depression  
• -China: MUCH  worse socially & economically 
• Mao inherited an impoverished, backwards economy
• Goals For the New State
• Agrarian Reform 
• National Political Unification
• Modern Economic Development (realizing it would be a long hard process) 
• Mao, very pragmatic about what was possible & the hardships to come after his victory
• Opposition
• Few counterrevolutions, Mao had already fought & won civil war when he came to power 
• Mao's: "New Democracy" -principles which Mao promised to govern the Chinese People's Republic 
• "Peoples Republic"  or "People's Democratic Dictatorship"- not "Bourgeois Democracy"
• Based on alliance of workers and peasantry 
• "United Front" included Workers, Peasantry, the petty & nationalistic Bourgeiose 
• Capitalism- Control it, not eliminate it. 
• Allowed indigenous capitalism (not rooted in imperial powers) to hasten modern economic development 
• "Democratic Dictatorship"  (Which did he want?)
• Mao's explanation: 
• Democracy to "the people" (United front) 
• Dictatorship over those not included in "The People" (i.e. landlords/imperialists)
• What was meant by the promise of Democracy?
• Promised the freedom of speech, assembly, association, & the right to vote for gov't 
• Post-feudal, pre-socialist period of relative democracy
• Poltical Representation of "the people"
• Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference  
• Sept. 21-30, 1949- Made good on CCP's post-war promise to form a coalition with the GDP
• GDP crushed, coalition gov't made no sense- GDP gave formal approval of Mao's new gov't
• Conference for political appearances- CCP appeared cooperative with long-time enemy, GDP
• Non-Communists given many positions in administration of the New state
•  Positions primarily ceremonious, but increased popular support on national issues
• Song Quingling (widow of Sun Yatsen) given an administrative position 
•  State Council (originally called Government Administrative Council)
• Under Premiership of Zhou Enlai
•  1949-1954 Country under military control 
•  Obstacles for new state:
• Backwardness
• Extremely traditional values 
• history of little national unification
• Impoverished economy 
• Primitive communication & Transportation 
• Regional loyalties 
• Nearly 5,000,000 Party members provided leadership & mass organization (allowing the country to be virtually unified from 1949-1952
• Many organizations established/ reorganized the party
• Education System
• Trade Unions 
• Peasant associations 
• the "people's court"
• popular militia 
• Power lay within the Politburo or more precisely, the Politburo's Standing Committee
• 1949 Standing Committee: Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu de, & Chen Yun

Territorial Unification: The Unfinished Task

•  1949- People's Republic formally proclaimed
• GDP's military power fell months before- Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan
• Red Army quickly conquered remaining areas of Southern China still controlled by the Nationalist Army & GDP-allied warlords
• Retreating Nationalist troops fled to the Shan region of Burma & supported themselves for almost 20 years with illicit opium trading & supplies air-dropped in by Americans
• West/ Northwest regions took longer to conquer 
• March 1950- CCP control of Xinjiang = last of GDP resistance on mainland
• October 1950- CCP tries to control Tibet
• Tibet declared as an independent state
• Chinese Nationalists still consider it part of China
• Nationalist Army still maintained control in Taiwan- Red Arm not able to attack
•  U.S. (President Truman) sent a fleet to "neutralize" the Taiwan straight 
• Therefore, Nationalist army lingered- GDP could still represent itself as the Chinese gov't
• Russia claimed control of areas in the north & in Manchuria 

Repression and Terror...

•  ADD NOTES FROM P.67-73
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