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The Great Leap Forward was an economic and social campaign within China from 1958 to 1962, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Party Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to transform the country from an agrarian society into an industrialized society through the formation of people's communes.
The Great Leap Forward took the goal of reviving pre-1949 success when the Party was base in Yan'an, when local Party cadre and local units took the initiative. But the failure of the Leap swung the Party back to allowing managers more control and central planners more authority. Chapters then treat "Control", "Cities", and "Villages".
In Gao's interpretation, the Great Leap Forward represents a disastrously failed trial of a different development model which prioritized local enterprise and decentralized industry. In this trial they attempted to create a work force that could be both industrial and agricultural, and a community that was not solely urban or rural.
In the process of establishment, land reform, and collectivization, these ideological syntheses led to the emergence of the famous Great Leap Forward movement and the Cultural Revolution. [ 1 ] In recent years, it has been argued, mainly by foreign commentators, that the CCP does not have an ideology, and that the party organization is ...
Both of these sociocultural movements can be seen as shaping Maoist theory on the need for and goals of Cultural Revolution, and subsequently the mass cultural movements enacted by the CCP under Mao, which include the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-rightist movement of the 1950s, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s-1970s. [39]
Under Mao's leadership, China broke with the Soviet model and announced a new economic program, the "Great Leap Forward", in 1958, aimed at rapidly raising industrial and agricultural production. Specific to industrial production, Mao announced the goal of surpassing the steel production output of Great Britain by 1968.
In January 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, to turn China from an agrarian nation to an industrialised one. [195] The relatively small agricultural collectives that had been formed were merged into far larger people's communes , and many peasants were ordered to work on infrastructure projects and on the production of iron and steel.
During the conference, Liu Shaoqi, the 2nd President of China and Vice Chairman of the Communist Party, delivered an important speech that formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made mistakes, which were mainly the radical economic policies of the Great Leap Forward since 1958.