Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (1950s) – Precursors of the Great Leap Forward

The first update to what I’ve already written about the land reforms of the 50s that I need to give for this history is the phase that occurred in 1958 and 1959 just as the Great Leap was getting underway. The move was made from the Higher-stage Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives of from 100 to 300 households to the People’s Communes. The total number formed was 24,000 and the notable difference was that they now aimed to and began to engage in more than agriculture. They also became engaged in industry, education, health, administration and military training. Typically a commune consisted of a large number of villages combined. Further economies of scale were hoped for. Some of the new features of the rural communal landscape included:

1) The idea of ‘walking on two legs’ (regional self-sufficiency) – farmers and farming would be organised by the localised cadres ‘sent down’ so that a region’s farmers could be taught to produce their own tools (and also produce other items) in regional light industrial plants;

2) So the countryside was to become industrialised for the first time. The rural/urban divide would be broken down;

3) The commune was to replace the family to some extent as the recognised basic social unit in the countryside;

4) Women were brought into production more;

5) Peasants were to become ‘proletarianised’; and

6) The whole operation became militarised in its style (with marching and expected sacrifices included). Campaign posters of the period often had a distinctly military flavour.

This element of militarisation and urbanisation as models of efficiency just made sense in the fledgling PRC of the 1950s concerned at how to emerge from the thrall of and repel the powerful forces of feudalism locally and capitalism worldwide, aided as they often both had been historically by powerful military and urban industrial bases, and aware of how successful the Red Army and Soviet urban industrial development had apparently been. Here’s a quote from a Red Flag issue from August 1958 that hints at the nature of all of this:

The working people have unfalteringly accepted the organisational forms of the people’s commune and have unfalteringly transformed many antiquated production relationships... The rapid development of agriculture demands that they greatly emphasise their own organisational character, demands that in their work they act faster, in a more disciplined and efficient way, that they can better be shifted around within a broad framework, like the workers in a factory or the soldiers in a military unit.

And another:

The people’s commune, which combines the industrial, agricultural, commercial, educational and military, is an advancing army fighting against nature, fighting for the industrialisation of the village, the urbanisation of the village and for the happy future of communism in the villages.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (1950s) – Theory of the Great Leap Forward

So with the intellectuals tamed, what was Mao’s great theory for China that went beyond valid criticism of the soviet planning model and that no one now felt able to challenge? He reckoned the Soviets were obsessed with the economy at the expense of correctly managing socialist society and politics and that his education campaigns were more the go. The correct consciousness would then translate into the enthusiasm that would drive the economy.

So it was really a reversal of Marxism-Leninism as I’ve discussed in an earlier post, more of Mao’s emphasis on voluntarism and more, too, of his love affair with or at least admiration of the peasants for good measure. His idea of how to arrive at Communism when compared with Lenin’s could be simply stated in the following equations:

Lenin: Communism = Party control + electricity (literally)

Mao: Communism = Party control + mass mobilisation (who cares about electricity?)

So how did he envisage the Great Leap Forward in these kinds of theoretical terms? He thought he could give peasants the ideology and the idea of greatness and it would then happen. He wrote his famous ‘Poor and Blank’ thesis in Red Flag’s 1 June 1958 issue:

Apart from other characteristics, China’s 600 Million people have two remarkable peculiarities; they are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.

This was Marxist turned on its head. Backwardness was now a good thing for Mao.

Central to this too was his idea of ‘continuous revolution’. There was never to be any sense of resting on one’s laurels in Mao’s conception. He was an incessant driver and saw this as vital to producing the goods of this revolution. So where Stalin had devised a ‘smooth growth’ model, Mao’s ideal was to be a rather more stop-start and violent process. Only under fully fledged Communism would there be no contradictions, after all. Bourgeois ideology would continue to require periodic crushing out of the peasants’ brains. This would improve the society, politics and, finally, the economy. The next contradiction would arise and require crushing and so on until Communism. So he thought all of the conflict and upheaval were good things. The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s effort to prove that enthusiasm produced by social reform and political education could abruptly transform the economy where soviet economic planning seemed to him to be failing (at least in relative terms).

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (1950s) – Mao’s Rethink

Early on in the period of the first five-year plan (in 1956) Mao critiqued the soviet model that had produced it and recognised the economic imbalances it had in turn produced in ‘On the Ten Major Relationships’. He called for a shift in emphasis from investment in the heavy industry beloved by Stalin to investment in light industry and agricultural technology, decentralisation of development and of economic control and the abandonment of ‘one-man-management’ in favour of ‘collective management’.

This signalled the beginning of Mao’s rethink that continued into 1958 and it is notable that today this period is considered by the CCP itself to be the one in which Mao began to get much of his thinking wrong (in 1981 it said Mao was 70% good 30% bad and that all the bad dated from 1957). Mainly this is because the crackdown that followed the call for the ‘flowers to bloom and ideas to contend and so on’, the failure of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution can be traced in part to that thinking. He was certainly on to something with the critique of the soviet model, however, but from there he went on (and off the rails).

Historians tend to suggest that Mao had probably wanted to get intellectuals on side and when surprised by his failure to do so overreacted with the anti-rightist campaign that followed its manifestation. Problems had arisen and he did need assistance to resolve the tensions that had built up.

Some accept his explanation that he was merely setting a trap, however.

His own apparent theoretical effort at rapprochement at least that led to such dismal failure began in February of 1957 with ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Amongst the People’. He tentatively concluded there that it was possible for contradictions to occur under socialism and that the CCP could be wrong leading to his suggestion that it might be possible for others to validly criticise it provided the criticism was constructive. He thus urged the party itself to listen out for constructive criticism from without but especially from the masses (his faith in intellectuals had never been complete). He had first asked for the ‘hundred flowers to bloom’ in May of 1956 and at that time he was speaking to intellectuals hoping they could help him build a better socialism.

So Mao at least apparently began with the aim of recognising the validity of some intelligent criticism but the end result was that he ultimately despaired of intellectuals as a group on which he could rely for his purposes (if he did ever trust them) and in addition created conditions for even the virtually complete absence of constructive criticism of decisions made at the centre.

All that many had aimed to do was help Mao to improve socialism when they accused the CCP of abandoning the peasants and workers and becoming a new ruling class but he simply didn’t see it like that. He saw them as enemies of the people just like Nationalists simply because they, by implication, had criticised him. The anti-rightist campaign commenced in June of 1957. Between half a million and a million people in all were labelled rightist over the course of about a year ending in 1958 with consequences often both dire and long term for both the individuals and their families.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (1950s) - Campaigns

So what did Mao learn about Marxism from around ten years of government culminating in the mass starvation precipitated by the Great Leap hysteria? Partly he was confirmed in his view that soviet methods needed to be better adapted to Chinese conditions but wasn't convinced that he could ever be wrong, I guess. I’m going to go back now to viewing the decade as Mao was viewing it and see if that helps us understand what was going on and what needed to (or would) happen next.

Mao was a campaigner who had developed his own campaigning methods (developed for Chinese conditions - now forced into soviet moulds). This would clearly not last long. He also had his own views on the role of intellectuals (that also fed into what eventuated in the Great Leap). The very first quotation in Mao’s famous ‘little red book’ (the publication of which I’ll discuss later) hints at the real orientation of the mind of Mao for many scholars. He asked “who are our friends and who are our enemies?” The quote is from 1926.

So now let’s first consider the campaign style (and both its intended and actual effects). The first role of the campaigns for Mao was to constantly update the understood definition of friend and enemy; that is, to answer what was for him the foundational question for his people. Once enemies were identified in the process of the campaign the next role of the campaign was, naturally, to either neutralise them or to in some way turn them into friends. One of the ways used to transform an enemy into a friend was labour (and this might be forced or voluntary) as Mao apparently genuinely believed in a mystical capacity of labour to proletarianise.

Not all of this obsession with enemies was paranoid. One fact of the new PRC was significant assassination campaigns against CCP cadres: 40,000 were killed by Nationalists and others in 1950 alone, for example.

The campaign formula (first developed in Yan’an) was always as follows:

1) There would be a launch with publicity, guiding documents and examples of targets (the current enemies) given;

2) Mass ‘struggle’ meetings would then be convened at which denunciations of people apparently meeting any of the targeted new enemy criteria would occur;

3) Then arrests and executions would occur; and

4) Finally some of the people would be considered rehabilitated and allowed to return to their normal lives. They would have had to criticise themselves after becoming reformed and re-educated (often after labour camp stints where Marxist re-education also occurred).

There were four notable campaigns of the early 1950s (summarised as follows) that enabled Mao to both generally re-educate his people and consolidate his power:

Year	Campaign Title	Targets	Results
1950	Suppression of Counter-Revolutionaries (鎮反)	‘armed bandits, spies and Nationalist backbone’	2 million arrests, 700,000 executions
1951	Thought Reform (思想改造)	Urban intellectuals	Marxist re-education of intellectuals
1951-52	Three Antis (sanfan三反)	Party members and government officials: for corruption, waste and bureaucratisation	‘Cleansing’ of party and government ranks
1952	Five Antis (wufan五反)	Bourgeoisie: for bribery, tax avoidance, theft of government property, theft of materials and theft of economic intelligence	Increased control over private enterprise