Was the great leap forward Chinas failure to comprehend stalinism - Essay Example

Only during the war years he turned his attention to the occupying Japanese imperial army. In all other cases his fight was against either internal opposition or other warlords. Thus he perhaps felt constrained in a peaceful environment. Thus Mao wrote “ War  is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions, when they have developed to a certain stage, between classes, nations, states, or political groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property and of classes”.

"(Mao, 1936, Selected Works,  Vol. I, p. 180). Part of his psyche can be gauged from the fact that just after gaining power in 1949 he entered the Korean War and also talked of exporting world revolution. After Stalin’s death in 1953 he assumed that the leadership of the communist world would descend on him. When this did not happen he thought of ways to assert his authority so that the communist movement recognized him. He occupied Tibet and waged a border war with India in 1962 and supported Castro at about the same time during the Cuban missile crisis.

At home Mao enforced Stalinist concepts in agriculture and industry and he talked of the great leap forward. . (Jacques, Andrieu (2002) The psychology of Mao, Brussels, Editions Complexe) History records that both the campaigns of Mao the Cultural Revolution and the hundred flowers bloom brought untold hardship to the common man. The policy of a hundred flowers was abandoned forthwith after Mao gauged the mood of his opponents, of whom many were arrested and sent to labor camps for rehabilitation.

By launching this campaign of a 100 flowers Mao was able to purge any challenges to his power and dissidents were all eliminated. Jung Chang opined in her book that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was merely a ruse to root out "dangerous" thinking.( Chang, Jung. 1991,Wild swans: three daughters of China. New York: Simon & Schuster.) The great leap forward which started in 1958 was Mao’s attempt to by pass the historical concept of industrialization and development by keeping society in ferment as well.

This was different from Stalin who set up a state controlled economy and no mass upheaval in society. Mao assumed that a perpetual revolution was a necessity in the development of China. In this his mind conditioned by decades of war and turmoil made him believe in quick solutions, irrespective of the hardship it could cause to the people Thus he started collective farms and abolished land ownership. The result was disastrous and famine stalked the land as Agriculture production fell to its lowest level.

( Ashton, Basil, Kenneth Hill, Alan Piazza, and Robin Zeitz. "Famine in China, 1958-61." Population and Development Review) He also decided that China needs more iron and thus enforced a scheme where he ordered all peasant houses to be converted to smelters for pig iron. But he erred grievously in