The Great Leap Forward and the Inherence of Famine to Socialism

Introduction

The moment in Chinese history inclusively spanning 1959 and 1961 CE is known to locals as the "three years of disaster." Following the Communist Party's victory in the Chinese Civil War and ensuing establishment of the People's Republic, Chairman Mao Zedong spearheaded a number of radical political, economic, and social campaigns aiming to transform China into an advanced society. His infamous 1958 attempt at rapid mass industrialization, dubbed the Great Leap Forward, brought about one of the worst famines in human history, with approximate death tolls ranging from 15 to 55 million depending on one's source.

At present, the Great Leap Forward's catastrophic failure is often cited as an empirical argument against socialist praxis, characterizing the program's calamity as common to and stemming from philosophically Marxist policy. What these arguments fail to address, however, is the confluence of complex factors that contributed to the famine, few of which were inherent to or even generally espoused by the fundamental doctrines of socialism. Alongside a series of natural disasters, Mao's overenthusiastic and misguided leadership engendered severe party mismanagement: tunnel-visioned grain and labor appropriations, unscientific rhetoric, and bureaucratic disinformation at every level, brought on more by power politics and intellectual bias than actual ideological prescriptions. Of the policies that produced the Great Chinese Famine, those that failed were largely idiosyncratic to Maoist leadership as well as pragmatic in nature, rather than inherent to or otherwise characteristic of socialism at large.

Natural Disaster and Unscientific Agronomy

The 1958 Yellow River flood was just one of a series of outstanding weather events that would come to define the following years. Typhoons, flooding, and other destructive natural disasters contributed significantly to subsequent famine. Daniel Houser and others found that "about 70% of all excess deaths can be tied to national policy effects," meaning 30% were attributable to adverse weather. Already, the time's pure misfortune would have had China plunged into some sort of catastrophe; however, the role played by policy was even greater still.

Chairman Mao pushed sweeping changes in government-sponsored agricultural techniques, mostly sourced from Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko's now-discredited prescriptions were politically-motivated, idiosyncratic rejections of Mendelian genetics, imported arbitrarily from the USSR by pro-Soviet CCP leadership. Close cropping — sowing seeds extremely densely based on the incorrect assumption that taxonomically similar plants would not compete with each other — resulted in the overcrowding of crops on insufficient soil. Techniques like deep plowing were ordered recklessly, and moderately fertile land was intentionally left uncultivated while resources were concentrated on only the most productive areas.

Further drastic action was taken under Mao's Four Pests Campaign, which sought to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Sparrows were pushed nearly to extinction in China, unintentionally allowing the locust populations they normally preyed upon to thrive. Rebecca Kreston elaborates that "the sparrow's intrinsic role in the ecological balance was unrealized and [the Campaign] resulted in an unmitigated, well-orchestrated environmental disaster. Locusts came in droves and devoured fields of grain." Few ideologies, and certainly very few socialist ideologies, call for the rejection of mainstream natural science — in fact, Marxism itself is in its purest form grounded in analysis of real material conditions.

Bureaucratic Disinformation

Chinese governance structure at the time relied on Party-level appointments prioritizing consequentialism above all — officials' fitness to lead was directly evaluated based on the results their leadership produced. Not wanting to report failure to their superiors for fear of punishment or deposition, these officials compensated by simply lying about their communes' yield statistics. Chen Yonggui, a CCP leader of one such commune, reported of the time that "the wind of exaggeration was blowing very hard. Anyone who had actually harvested 100 catties would report 1000 … all the grain they reported did not exist — empty figures. The whole state plan got messed up."

This pervasive tendency of local administrators to grossly overreport grain yield was endemic across China at the time. Mao's already-intense attitude towards agricultural collectivization was later only spurred on by the "illusion of superabundance" he was granted by the expedient lies of bureaucrats, encouraging the hasty execution of underdeveloped and overambitious plans. Economist Xin Meng and others demonstrated that even with suffering harvests, total grain production was actually adequate for staving off famine; the issue lay in the excessive appropriation and inefficient distribution of said grain.

Officials only felt the need to exaggerate because within the Maoist model of appointment-based bureaucracy, the legitimacy of their power came from the Party rather than the people. Due to this practical need for authority, the CCP's non-democracy was blatantly un-socialist in ideology — both by Mao's own writings espousing popular democracy and by the standards of wider socialism, whose principal stated priority is always to place power in the hands of the people.

Grain Misappropriation and the Commune System

By far the greatest contributing factor to the famine was the government's over-appropriation of both agricultural product and labor. The illusion of superabundance led planners to shift lands from grain to economic crops and divert huge numbers of agricultural laborers into industrial sectors. It also prompted the Chinese leadership to speed up grain exports to secure foreign currency for capital goods needed for industrialization — all contributing to the rapid exhaustion of grain supplies.

In the city of Xinyang, "if the reserve grain had been distributed, no one would have starved … The starving people saw storage silos full of grain, but no one attempted to steal it. People sat alongside storage depots waiting for the government to release grain and crying out, 'Communist Party, Chairman Mao, save us!' Some people starved to death sitting next to the grain depots." The Great Leap actually produced higher death rates in regions that produced more food per capita, mainly in rural areas where farming had been collectivized into people's communes.

The communes themselves, however — characteristic of a classically socialist mode of agricultural organization — were not actually unsuccessful in terms of output over the duration of their existence following the Great Leap. After the famine ended, the communes underwent restructuring and actually created a considerable rebound in national productivity. They efficiently utilized the capital gained from Great Leap-era exports to invest in large-scale infrastructural and technological developments. Until decollectivization, the communes remained responsible for citizen social welfare in spheres like education and healthcare.

Conclusion

The Great Leap Forward remains one of the most significant events of contemporary Chinese history, as devastating a sheer loss of human life as it was an integral step in the transformation of China from rural backwater to economic powerhouse in under a century. Due to the misfortune of adverse weather conditions as well as a host of ideologically un-socialist missteps on the part of Chairman Mao, the Great Famine was responsible for dozens of millions of deaths. It remains undeniable that only those programs definitionally synonymous with socialism granted eventual success. The rest will live on in infamy as the catastrophic consequences of the failures of Maoist leadership.

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