The Great Leap Forward and Mao Zedong in China - Research Paper Example

Mao Zedong’s China – An overview Introduction Mao Zedong’s is one of the most powerful and memorable names in the history of world politics. The founding father of People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao was a Marxist philosopher and the leader of the Chinese Revolution. The efforts of this great visionary had great impacts on Chinese population that encountered several political influences by the invasion of external powers as well as the civil wars. He was a great thinker and a strategist with specialized military styles especially, the guerilla warfare. The growth of majority of China’s political reformation initiatives was influenced by the Maoists views. As a great philosopher, Mao claimed the appreciation of Chinese people as the greatest and the wisest politician and strategist. In the opinion of historians, “Mao as the correct interpreter of the past would become the ideological authority defining the present and future course of revolution.” (Saich and Yang, .xiv). His contributions to the political reforms in China worked better for the wellbeing of the countrymen; therefore all his policies and revolutionary thoughts are together called Maoism. Mao came into power with the establishment of People’s Republic of China in 1949 by defeating the Nationalists leader Chiang Kai-Shek soon after the surrender of Japanese forces before the mighty Maoist guerillas (“Spartacus Educational”). Mao’s wisdom and excellence in delivering communist ideas for revolutionary public welfare schemes were considered with high regards by people even after his death. However, his visionary approaches to sudden political changes always cost him dearly. As BBC reports, the communist movement introduced in the agricultural and industrial sector ultimately resulted in a great reduction in agricultural productivity; and although his measures for the implementation of commune-based administrative system in the development process of agricultural and industrial sector was of little effect, the government ensured education to all children. However, many of revolutionary movements were beyond his calculations and brought devastating results at the end. According to the opinion of Kalman, although Mao-led Cultural Revolution ended in 1969, it took many years for the country to recover from the losses incurred from the chaos during it (15). The Great Leap Forward The Great Leap Forward was the initiative of Mao Zedong in 1958 in order to modernize China’s economic structure with a view to take it towards a competitive equality with that of America’s by 1988. Mao had a clear view about the capabilities of Chinese people to work hard; therefore he emphasized the focus mainly on the revolutionary development of industry and agriculture. It was his idea to introduce a five-year plan in pursuit of the targeted achievements in the initial phase by working rapidly from 1958-63. This revolutionary change that came in the form of the second five year plan in his tenure was called the Great Leap Forward. His empirical view was that the growth of both agriculture and industry had to go on hand-in-hand, as one was dependent on the other. While farmers wanted quality tools and fertilizers, people employed in the industrial sector had to be fed from the prosperity of agriculture. The commune provided everything needed for the social life of people; it cared for their education, health and support for elderly people, so that it could guarantee uninterrupted work from the able members of the society (“Historylearningsite.co.uk”, n.d).The total area of agricultural land was divided into separate units cultivated and managed by communes consisting around five thousand families. The commune had the authority on the entire land and tools used for agriculture, thereby the entire property came under the solitary and social ownership of the communes. Mao’s leadership was very effective in implementing whatever decisions he took about the progress of the proposed assignments under the five year plan. Immediate Consequences of the Great Leap Forward Mao had his vision on eradication of poverty owing to distributed ownership of land and agriculture by farmers and industries by individuals during the late 1950s. With this in view, he formulated the revolutionary motion to take up every productive side under the state ownership and govern the administration of the public on the basis of their requirements. The initial phase of the program was incredible as the farmers and industrialists offered to serve for the state and the common people were fed well across the community dining halls. Experts say (Munro), that agriculture labor was transformed into heroic efforts for setting up heavy industries for steel production in the countryside. There was enormous progress of labor transition and unorthodox applications in farming for improved yielding. On the other hand, in the opinion of Munro, the rapid changes in the combined sector of agriculture and industries brought extreme pressure on the supervisory cadre that eventually turned helpless to accurately assess the progress of the scheme (31). Thus the immediate impact of unorganized activities came in the form of lack of accountability among the local leaders that gradually paved way for violence among communes and segregated workforces. Political dissimilarities among the ministers and the chaos among the local authorities put the productive involvement of common people in a standstill and the entire farmers turned resistant without contributing their share of labor in the farming. Adding to the miseries, the Great Leap Forward mission had constructed a number of care-homes for elderly and destitute people in consideration with their inability to contribute to labor. A large amount of state funds were spent for the construction of such establishments in the rural areas of China from 1958. However, a rapid intensity of food shortage due to the decreased agricultural productivity and the resultant famine in the subsequent years affected the operation of such homes and the inmates were thrown to their fate. Mao’s idea was to create an intense growth in the productivity of agriculture for the purpose of meeting the people’s basic need for food by storing the surplus yield. However, this policy turned a disguised opportunity for most of the farming workers to stay idle with a protective feeling that they would be fed well at community dining halls as it was common those days. As a result of the surplus food production, peasants searched employment in the industrial sector, basically at the countryside steel plants rather than in modernized agricultural sector. As per reports, the impact of irregularities in human resources management and departmentalization of labor was severe; and around 16.5 million people lost their lives in the famine that was the contribution of the Great Leap Forward (Maoists.org). However, like Morgan, some are of the belief that, how many died during 1958-60 as a consequence of the famine posed by the Great Leap Forward is still uncertain (1-10). The visible effect of the devastating conditions were so notoriously alarming that Mao himself admitted the failure of policy making while accusing the unfavorable climate in the country as a cause for large portion of the calamities. During the great famine, China was the centre point of discussions in all the world countries; especially the western countries had it as a chance to criticize Mao and allegedly exaggerated most of the figures for political sensation among respective nationals. Demographic Impacts Demographic disparities rapidly increased as an immediate impact of the Great Leap Forward since the famine broke out. The government officials were clueless of a comfortable solution to reimburse the minimum standards of living to millions of people. The worse effect of the famine was that the country got filled with abandoned and orphaned children whose general health deteriorated due to sudden outburst of communicable diseases. According to demographers, “In any case, population statistics from the local orphanages show that institutional care was unavailable even for most of those orphans located by county governments” (Munro, 37). Efforts were made to categorize aged inmates in the old-age homes and the comparatively capable ones among the old people were either drawn to work fields or asked to volunteer their possible share of effort. The country was facing an insurgence that was mostly fuelled by the issues of rehabilitation of the female community, consisting mainly of young girls and suckling mothers. The young generation, on the other hand, became unruly and started making radical groups to outsmart the weaker sections for grabbing their basic needs. With famine at its peak by 1960, any effort from the government to regulate administrative affairs seemed worthless. The famine that broke out in the rural China gradually entered the cities and townships as the scarcity of food was something beyond the rich could maintain with money. Impact on Environment Massive agricultural productivity being its fundamental aim with equal proportion of industrial growth, the Great Leap Forward considered nothing good for the environmental safety. Sudden changes in the demand for increasing the farm land forced people to encroach the forest lands which were considered more fertile. With the human invasion in its peak, the geographical frame of the rural Chinese mainland was disturbed. There was no control over the deforestation activities; as result, trees were cut down and hills were leveled for the purpose of agriculture. The activists of the Cultural Revolution also had their contribution in destruction of manmade structures and all possible government properties, whose debris worked as the mighty agents for sedimentation problems in rivers and lakes. Environmentalists say that “following the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution, the environmental problems of the country exploded” (Heggelund, 38). Large scale land leveling schemes implemented during the five-year plan created uncontrollable levels of soil erosion by which not only the farms lost fertility, but the water storage of most of the rivers and lakes was reduced due to settlement of the erosive soil. Apart from this, China also lost a number of rare species of flora and fauna or led many of them to the brim of extinction. Political and Economic Consequences Mao’s mission to set up a communist regime in the Chinese mainland resulted in political consequences in the post-Maoist China that eventually spread across different countries in Asia. As famine hit the country at its worst, the land acquirement and retaliation movements between the communist supported working class and the landlords and upper class peasants brought a savage wind that killed millions in the riots manifested by the Maoist supporters in 1958. Certain findings reveal that, “The Great Leap Forward Movement and the economic dislocations that it created, directly resulted in the Great Famine” (Mendes and Lalonde-Roussey, 256). Political disorder as an immediate result of the Great Leap Forward left China a battle field for civil wars amidst the threats of invaders. The communist China also had its ties going cold with all major countries with the emergence of the Cultural Revolutions in 1966. Economic policy failures of Maoist views ought to take the responsibility of the consequences of the famine. A study suggests that diversion of the resources from agriculture, especially to boost industry in 1959, contributed to around 33 per cent of the shortage in food production during 1958-1961; and the subsequent years of famine were all about making a turning point in China’s liberated economic policies with moderate views, but the impact of the Great Leap was so deep that the successive decades had to take abnormal struggles to regulate the once-demolished Chinese economy (Yang, 1-40). However, the efforts made post famine by Mao was politically insufficient enough to gain the trust of people, as it had by then provoked far and wide civil unrest among the people of China. Conclusion As an overview of the entire scenario after the implementation of the Great Leap Forward, it is unbelievable to think that such a wise personality like Mao Zedong makes a mistake. The story of the collapse of the total economy and the calamities posing such a huge death toll by the empirical approach of an administrator is unique even today for the demographers and historians. Even for the scholars, the entire incident remains a historical event happened in China that took the country from normalcy to prosperity and devastation in the span of a wink – and the end results are the enduring impacts of some scary memories of the past. Although many natural factors were responsible for a little part of the failure, one cannot deny a perpetual revolutionist Mao’s emphatic role in it with his haste and untimely application of autocratic policies. Works Cited BBC. “History: Mao Zedong (1983-1976).” (2011). Web. 02 December 2011. Historylearningsite.co.uk. “The great leap forward.” (n.d). Web. 02 December 2011. < http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/great_leap_forward.htm> Heggelund, Gorild. Environment and Resettlement Policies in China: The Three Gorges Project. England: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2004. Print. Kalman, Bobbie. China: The Land. USA: Crabtree Publishing Company, 2008. Print. Li, Wei & Yang, Dennis Tao. “The great leap forward: Anatomy of a central planning disaster.” (2005): 1-40. Web. 02 December 2011. Mendes, Errol & Lalonde-Roussey, Anik. Bridging the Global Divide on Human Rights: A Canada-China Dialogue. England: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2003. Print. Munro, Robin. Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s State Orphanages. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996. Print. Maoists.org. “Did Mao really kill millions in the great leap forward?.” (n.d). Web. 02 December 2011. Morgan, Stephen L. “The welfare consequences of the great leap forward famine in China, 1959-61: The structure of the survivor.” International Economy History Congress. (2006): 1-19. Web. 02 December 2011. Munro, Robin. Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s State Orphanages. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996. Print. Saich, Tony & Yang, Benjamin. The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party. USA: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. Print. Spartacus Educational. “Mao Zedong.” (n.d). Web. 02 December 2011. Read More