Imagine, just for a moment, the sheer magnitude
of the ambition we're looking at today. You're
looking at a country, a vast, largely agrarian
society, where the overwhelming majority of people
are subsistence farmers working with hand tools.
And you decide, you know, we're going to turn
this into a world -class industrial superpower.
Right. Which, I mean, that sounds like a fairly
standard development goal for the 20th century.
Everyone wanted to industrialize. They did. But
here's the kicker. You decide you aren't going
to do it in a century. You aren't even going
to do in 50 years. You decide you're going to
do it in roughly five years. Which is it's just
sounds physically impossible. It sounds like
science fiction. Exactly. But that's the premise
we're unpacking for you today. We are taking
a deep dive into one of the most ambitious and
ultimately one of the most devastating social
experiments in human history. The Great Leap
Forward in China, running roughly from 1958 to
1962. And I want to be clear right off the bat
for everyone listening. This isn't just a history
lesson about dates and maps. The mission for
this deep dive is to investigate a really specific
kind of terrifying dynamic. We're looking at
what happens when high -level ideology completely
steamrolls technical reality. It's essentially
a case study in ignoring the experts. In a way,
yeah. It's about this intense desire to defy
the conventional understanding of time, as some
of the historians in our sources put it. The
leadership essentially decided that physics,
economics, biology, they were all just suggestions
that could be overcome with enough willpower.
And we have a pretty heavy stack of sources for
this one. We're pulling from government policy
documents from the era, retrospective economic
analyses, and some truly harrowing oral histories
from survivors of the famine that followed. Yeah,
it's a story that starts with genuine electric
optimism, this huge dream of modernization. And
it ends with a tragedy so massive, it's actually
difficult for the human mind to comprehend. So
let's set the stage a bit. It's the late 1950s.
The People's Republic of China has been established
for nearly a decade. But the vibe isn't, you
know, we made it. The vibe is tension. Intense
tension. Specifically with their big brother,
the Soviet Union. The sources highlight that
the Sino -Soviet relationship was really fracturing
at this point. Mao Zedong realized China couldn't
rely on Soviet technology or aid forever. He
felt like they were being treated as a junior
partner. Exactly. And he hated it. So the motivation
here is total self -reliance. Self -reliance.
But on steroids. He didn't just want to catch
up to the West. He wanted to leapfrog them entirely.
He famously set this goal to catch up with and
surpass the United Kingdom in industrial output
in just 15 years. Which, again, for a country
that was still mostly farming with hand tools,
is bold. Bold is putting it mildly. To achieve
this, the party theorists came up with a strategy
they called walking on two legs. I've always
found that name kind of interesting. It sounds
practical. Like you need two legs to move forward.
Don't leave anyone behind. That's the marketing
side of it, sure. But the economic reality was
very distinct. Walking on two legs meant developing
heavy industry and light agriculture simultaneously.
It meant trying to develop the urban centers
and the rural countryside at the exact same time.
But usually in economic development, you focus
capital on one area, generate a surplus, and
then fund the other. You build the factories
and then you modernize the farms. Precisely.
That's the slow, conventional way. But China
didn't have the capital money or machinery to
do that. So the core belief of the Great Leap
was that they could substitute capital with labor.
Like if you don't have a bulldozer, just use
a thousand people with shovels. That's exactly
it. They believed the sheer volume of human labor,
fueled by revolutionary enthusiasm, could bend
the curve of economic growth. They thought human
spirit could literally replace machinery. The
sources mention a slogan that really captures
this energy. It goes, go all out, aim high, and
build socialism with greater, faster, better,
and more economical results. It's catchy. But
if you've ever managed any kind of project, you
know about the project management triangle, right?
You can have it fast, good, or cheap. You pick
two. And this slogan is essentially saying, pick
all four. Right. Faster and better and more economical
usually don't coexist in reality. But the ideology
dictated that if we work hard enough, logic just
doesn't apply. And this brings us to the first
massive structural change, the people's communes.
This is where the daily life of the average person
gets completely rewritten. Completely overturned.
By 1958, private ownership was essentially abolished.
And we aren't just talking about land. We are
talking about everyday life. Households were
merged into these massive communes. An average
commune might hold 5 ,000 families. 5 ,000 families
living as one single unit. Effectively, yes.
They worked together, lived in shared spaces,
and crucially, they ate together. The sources
detail the establishment of communal canteens.
The idea being to just get rid of the home kitchen
entirely. Yes. The state wanted to free people,
especially women, from domestic labor, like cooking
and cleaning, so that absolutely everyone could
be on the production line. You eat in canteen,
you work in the fields or the factories, and
you get paid in work points rather than cash.
It sounds like they were trying to turn the entire
country into one giant factory floor. That's
a really great way to put it. And speaking of
factories, we have to talk about the most iconic
and maybe the most confusing image of this era.
The backyard furnaces. This is the part that
always stops me in my tracks when I read about
it. The leadership wanted to double steel production
in a single year, 1958. But they didn't have
the steel mills to actually do it. So in the
spirit of walking on two legs, they decentralized
steel production. If you don't have a modern
blast furnace, you build a small clay furnace
right in your backyard. And when we say you,
we mean farmers, people who know how to grow
wheat, not smelt iron. Correct. Millions of peasants
were diverted from farming to man these furnaces.
The sources say the sky was lit up at night for
miles because of the fires from millions of these
small kilns. It must have looked incredible,
but economically it was a disaster waiting to
happen. Well, yeah, because here is the technical
snag. To make steel, you need iron ore and fuel.
Where were they getting the raw material for
this? Often they simply didn't have it. But remember
the immense pressure here. You must meet the
quota. Everything is about the quota. So the
sources describe people literally melting down
their own possessions. Like what kind of possessions?
Everything. cooking pots, door handles, bicycles,
even agricultural tools. Wait, they were melting
down their hose and plows to make steel? Yes.
While they were also supposed to be increasing
agricultural output. The irony is tragic. They
were destroying the very tools of food production
to create steel. And the result is just heartbreaking.
The nation did technically produce 10 .7 million
tons of steel that year. The quota was technically
met. But the records show. that about 3 million
tons of it was basically useless slag. They called
it native iron. Because these backyard furnaces
couldn't get hot enough or remove impurities,
the metal was brittle. It cracked. It was totally
useless for construction or industry. So you've
destroyed the pots and pans, you've melted the
farming tools, you've burned down forests for
fuel, and you have a huge pile of useless rubble
to show for it. Exactly. And crucially, you've
taken the labor force away from the fields right
during the harvest. Which leads us to the other
leg of the strategy. If you are pulling millions
of people away from farming to play blacksmith,
how on earth do you feed the country? You need
the fields to be magically hyperproductive. You
need a miracle. And so the leadership turned
to some very questionable science to try and
get one. Enter Trofim Lysenko. Now, this is a
name that comes up in history books as a massive
warning label for politicized science. He was
a Soviet agronomist, right? Yes, and his theories
were ideologically very convenient. Lysenko rejected
Mendelian genetics, the Western idea of genes
and DNA. He believed the environment was abs—
absolutely everything. He actually argued that
plants of the same class wouldn't compete with
each other because they were comrades. Wait,
he applied Marxist class theory to plants? He
did. And the Chinese leadership, desperate for
higher yields, adopted this wholesale. This led
to a widespread practice called close cropping.
The logic being, if plants are comrades, we can
plant them super close together and they'll just
share the sunlight. Exactly. They planted seeds
three, four, even five times denser than normal.
They thought the plants would work together.
But biology doesn't care about ideology. No,
it doesn't. Plants compete for light, water,
and nutrients regardless of their class. When
you plant wheat that densely, it suffocates.
The crocs simply rotted in the fields. It was
a total failure. And didn't they also try something
called deep plowing? Yes. The theory was that
if you plowed two or three feet deep, you'd encourage
massive root systems. In reality, they just buried
the fertile topsoil and brought up useless clay
and rocks and gravel. They effectively destroyed
the soil fertility. It's a cascading series of
errors. But there's one more detail in the sources
that really highlights just how broken the ecological
understanding was. The Four Pests Campaign. Ah,
yes. The war on nature. The government identified
four pests to be completely eliminated. Rats,
flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Sparrows. The
bird. Specifically, the Eurasian tree sparrow.
The logic was simple enough. Sparrows eat grain
seeds. Therefore, sparrows are stealing from
the people. If we kill the sparrows, we'll have
more grain. So they mobilized the entire population
to hunt birds. It was total war. People banging
pots and pans for days to keep the birds flying
until they just dropped dead from sheer exhaustion.
They destroyed nests, broke eggs. They nearly
drove the bird to extinction in China. Which,
in a vacuum, sounds like it would save some grain.
Short term, maybe. But again, biology bites back.
Sparrows don't just eat grain. They eat insects.
Specifically locusts. Oh, no. With the natural
predator wiped out, the following year saw a
massive, devastating swarm of locusts. They ate
absolutely everything. The ecological balance
wasn't just disturbed. It was obliterated. So
let's recap the situation by 1959. You have labor
diverted to useless steel. You have bad planting
techniques killing the crop yield. You have locusts
swarming because you killed the birds. This is
a recipe for famine. It is. But. And this is
the part that is crucial for understanding the
mission of this deep dive. The leadership didn't
realize how bad it was. How is that even possible?
If people are hungry, how does the government
not know? This brings us to the information bubble.
We have to look at the political incentive structure.
There's a culture of terror. Local officials
knew that if they reported a failure to meet
the quota, they would be labeled rightists or
counterrevolutionaries. They'd be purged. So
they just lied. They lied on a massive scale.
The sources call this phenomenon... Launching
satellites. Launching satellites. It was the
specific term for reporting incredibly high,
exaggerated -to -production figures. It became
a competition. If one commune reported 5 ,000
pounds of grain, the next one would report 10
,000, just to look more loyal. Even if the field
only produced 1 ,000. Exactly. And here is where
the math turns deadly. The state calculated how
much grain to take as tax. Based on those reported
numbers, not the actual harvest. Oh, I see where
this is going. If the state thinks you have 10
,000 pounds. And they tax you 30%. They take
3 ,000 pounds. Right. But if you only actually
produce 3 ,000 pounds. They take everything you
have. They take everything. They swept the granaries
clean, genuinely believing the peasants still
had plenty left over because the report said
so. The state warehouses were filling up while
the villages were left with absolutely nothing.
Did no one at the top try to stop this? Surely
someone saw the discrepancy. Some tried. The
most tragic example in the sources is the Lucian
Conference in 1959. Marshall Pang DeWay, who
was a genuine war hero, wrote a private letter
to Mao. Was he aggressive about it? No, that's
the thing. He was fairly polite. He validated
the great achievements, but suggested there was
some petty bourgeois fanaticism causing errors.
He was trying to be the voice of reason, pointing
out that maybe the numbers were a bit off. And
how did Mao take this constructive criticism?
He viewed it as a deep personal betrayal. He
circulated the letter and absolutely destroyed
Peng. Peng was purged, stripped of his position,
and humiliated. And the message that sent to
everyone else. Keep your mouth shut. If a war
hero can't speak the truth, no one can. This
cemented the silence. And that silence allowed
the famine to fester for three solid years. We're
arriving at the most difficult part of our deep
dive today. The Great Chinese Famine. The scale
is truly hard to wrap your head around. Estimates
vary because the records are so incomplete. But
a consensus figure among many historians is around
30 million deaths. 30 million. That's the entire
population of a decent -sized country just gone.
It is widely considered the largest famine in
human history in terms of absolute numbers. And
the details in the sources, they're nightmare
fuel. It wasn't just people running out of food.
It was what they were forced to consume to stay
alive. I read the accounts of what people were
eating. It wasn't just rationing rice. No. When
the grain was gone, they ate grass. Then tree
bark. The author Jan Lianke, who survived this
as a child in Henan province, recalls his mother
teaching him which tree bark was edible and which
would poison you. And the clay. I saw references
to something called Guanyin soil. Yes. White
clay. People ate it because it filled the stomach
and stopped the hunger pangs for a moment. But
the human body can't digest clay. It blocked
their intestines and people died in agony from
the blockage. It's a horrific way to go. There's
also the mention of coal. Dan Lianke wrote about
eating lumps of coal to appease the devil in
the stomach. It shows the absolute level of desperation.
And here is a fact that I found physically difficult
to read. During the peak famine years, China
remained a net exporter of grain. Wait. While
people are eating coal and clay, the country
is sending food out. Yes. Mao wanted to maintain
face internationally and pay back debts to the
Soviet Union to prove China's strength. The sources
mentioned that when the Japanese foreign minister
offered 100 ,000 tons of wheat secretly, so no
one would know, China refused it. They refused
aid. They refused it. The projection of success
was deemed more important than the reality of
survival. The ideology demanded that China be
seen as strong and accepting aid would be admitting
weakness. And inside the villages, the social
fabric completely unraveled. It wasn't just passive
starvation. The sources discussed these struggle
sessions. This was the enforcement mechanism.
If you were suspected of hoarding grain, or if
you were labeled a rich peasant, or even if you
just looked like you weren't working hard enough,
you were subjected to public humiliation and
violence. They were turning on neighbors. It
created a cycle of terror. You couldn't leave
because you needed a travel permit. You couldn't
complain or you'd be purged. And you couldn't
eat. It was a prison with no walls. Eventually,
though, the reality had to catch up. You can't
fake production figures forever when 30 million
people are missing. Exactly. By 1961 and 1962,
the government had to backpedal. The numbers
simply couldn't be ignored anymore. The population
graph had literally inverted. This is where we
see a shift in the leadership. Mao takes a step
back. He steps back from the day -to -day management
of the economy. He remained the chairman, the
figurehead, but he let more pragmatic leaders
like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping take the wheel.
And what did they do? They brought back sanity.
They dismantled the communal canteens. They allowed
peasants to have small private plots of land
again. They stopped the backyard furnaces. Basically...
They undid the leap. And the food supply recovered.
It did relatively quickly once the policies changed.
But the damage, the scars of this era lasted
for decades. It wasn't something you could just
fix. Let's talk about those scars. Beyond the
staggering death toll, how did this reshape the
society? Well, look at the Iron Women movement.
Women had moved into traditionally male jobs
because the men were drafted for steel projects
or had died. It changed the gender dynamic in
China permanently. but at a huge cost to the
family unit, which had essentially broken down
under the commune system. And what about the
physical health of the survivors? There's a specific
term in the medical literature, the 1959 birth
cohort. The kids born during the famine suffered
severe malnutrition in utero and infancy. Studies
show that as adults, this generation was significantly
stunted, estimated to be about three centimeters
shorter on average than cohorts born before or
after. The famine literally shrunk a generation.
And ecologically. Massive deforestation. To fuel
those backyard furnaces, they cut down huge swaths
of trees. That led to severe soil erosion, which
worsened floods and droughts in the years that
followed. It created environmental instability
that took decades to address. There is one more
connection we need to make before we wrap up.
You mentioned Mao stepped back. Did he stay back?
Ah, this is the critical narrative thread. No,
he didn't. Mao felt sidelined. He felt that Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were taking China down
a capitalist road to fix the mess he created.
He deeply resented it. So the Great Leap Forward
actually sets the stage for the next disaster.
Directly. The expert consensus across the sources
is that Mao's insecurity after the Great Leap
Forward motivated him to launch the Cultural
Revolution in 1966. He wanted to regain absolute
control and purify the party of the moderates
who would fix the economy. So the tragedy of
the famine is the prelude to the chaos of the
Cultural Revolution. It's a lot to process. We
started with this idea of a country trying to
sprint toward the future, and instead they tripped
and fell into a nightmare. It serves as a stark
reminder. The mission of the Great Leap was to
modernize, which is a rational goal. But when
you remove the feedback mechanisms, when you
punish the truth -tellers and replace technical
expertise with political slogans, you lose the
ability to correct course. It's the ultimate
lesson in humility, I think. You can't just wish
your way around the laws of economics or nature.
No, you cannot. Ideology is powerful, but it
cannot create calories out of thin air. So as
we wrap up this deep dive, what is the big takeaway
we should leave everyone with? I think we are
left with the question of accountability in a
closed system. You know, even after the famine,
when the policies were rolled back, the party
maintained the three red flags. The three red
flags. The general line. the Great Leap, and
the People's Communes. Even though they had caused
this unmitigated disaster, the official line
was that these flags were correct. They admitted
to errors in implementation, blaming the weather
or bad local officials, but the ideology itself
was declared infallible. Which is terrifying.
It means the system didn't actually learn the
lesson. It suggests it didn't. And the provocative
thought I want to leave you with is this. How
does a system, any system, whether it's a country
or a massive corporation, correct itself when
the mission statement is considered more important
than the reality on the ground? If the idea can
never be wrong, then the people suffering under
it must be the problem. And as long as that logic
holds, history is always liable to repeat itself.
That is a heavy thought to end on, but a profoundly
necessary one. This was a tough topic, but understanding
these historical moments is the only way to spot
the patterns when they show up again in the world.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into
the Great Leap Forward. It's vital history. Thanks
for listening. See you next time.