From a Hundred Flowers
to the Great Leap Forward
The
Hundred Flowers campaign was not a simple plot by Mao to reveal the
hidden rightists in his country, as some critics later charged and as
he himself seemed to claim in the published versions of his speech
“On ... Contradictions.” It was, rather, a muddled and
inconclusive
movement that grew out of conflicting attitudes within the CCP
leadership and forced the intellectuals of China to take a public
stance on matters of policy and the meaning of their own lives under
the Communist party. At its center was an argument about the pace and
type of
development that was best for China, a debate about the nature of the
First Five-Year Plan and the promise for further growth. From that
debate and the political tensions that accompanied it sprang the Great
Leap Forward. (SMC, 514)
Despite the speed of compliance with the call for
higher-level cooperatives, agricultural production figures for 1957
were disappointing. Grain production increased only 1 percent over the
year, in the face of a 2 percent population rise. ... Mao’s emerging
response to the disappointing agricultural production on the
cooperative farms was a strategy of heightened production through moral
incentives and mass mobilization under the direction of inspirational
local party leaders. Mao’s vision, which drew on memories of methods
used in Yan’an, was endorsed by Deng Xiaoping as party
secretary-general, and by Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s probable
successor. ... China’s economic woes would be solved by the spontaneous
energizing of the whole nation. (SMC, 514-5)
In late 1957, the leaders of the CCP began to
experiment with a new scale of social organization by mobilizing the
peasants for gigantic new tasks in water control and irrigation, as if
to prove that human will and strength could vanquish all natural and
technical challenges.
By the end of January 1958, 100 million peasants
had allegedly opened up 7.8 million hectares of land through irrigation
work. If China’s people could be galvanized in this way, surely they
could transform agricultural production equally; it was a question of
finding the right organizational forms and maintaining mass
commitment. (SMC, 517)
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The term “people’s commune” (renmin gongshe)
was not used in party journals until July 1958, but as early as April
the trial abolition of private plots and the amalgamation of 27 Henan
cooperatives into one immense commune of 9,369 households were carried
out.
By the summer of 1958, after a fine harvest had
dramatically raised everyone’s hopes, the campaign to end private plots
and to organize all of rural China into people’s communes began, with
extraordinary apparent success. ... Evidently dazzled by claims that
rural production under commune management had doubled, increased
tenfold, or even “scores of times,” the Central Committee issued this
ecstatic vision of the Great Leap process:
The
people have taken to organizing themselves along military lines,
working with militancy, and leading a collective life, and this has
raised the political consciousness of the 500 million peasants still
further. Community dining rooms, kindergartens, nurseries, sewing
groups, barber shops, public baths, happy homes for the aged,
agricultural middle schools, “red and expert” schools, are leading the
peasants toward a happier collective life and further fostering ideas
of collectivism among the peasant masses. ... In the present
circumstances, the establishment of people’s communes ... is the
fundamental policy to guide the peasants to accelerate socialist
construction, complete the building of socialism ahead of time, and
carry out the gradual transition to communism. (SMC, 518-9)
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People’s communes, which mark a new
stage in the socialist movement in China’s rural areas, are now being set up and
developed in many places at a rapid rate. ... The people’s commune is characterized by its bigger
size and more socialist nature. ... People’s communes so far established usually
have a membership of 10,000 people each, in some cases 10,000 households. ... Being
big, they can do many things hitherto impossible to the agricultural producers’
co-operatives, such as building medium-sized water-conservancy works, setting up
factories and mines requiring complicated technique, carrying out big projects
of road and housing construction, establishing secondary schools and schools of
higher learning, etc. ...
The people’s commune represents a much higher degree of socialist development
and collectivization than the agricultural producers’ co-operative. Its massive
scale of production requires organization with a higher efficiency and great
maneuverability of labour as well as the participation of all the women in
production. Consequently more and more community canteens, nurseries, sewing
groups and other kinds of establishments are being set up, and the last remnants
of individual ownership of the means of production retained in the agricultural
producers’ co-operatives are being eliminated. In many places, for instance, the
reserved plots, livestock, orchards, and major items of production tools owned
by individual peasants have been transferred to the people’s communes in the
course of their organization. ...
During the current leap forward in agricultural
production and rural work the mass of peasants have witnessed not only a
several-fold increase in agricultural production but also the happy future of
industrialization and urbanization of rural areas. As a result, the prestige of
the Party has become more consolidated than ever among the peasants. The
peasants have shown an unprecedentedly firm determination to achieve socialism
at an earlier date and to prepare conditions for the gradual transition to
communism. ...
Some
people’s communes may have gone farther than others, but generally speaking, the
transformation of collective ownership into ownership by the whole people is a
process that will take three or four years, even five or six years, to complete
in the rural areas. Then, after a number of years, production will be greatly
increased. ... Differences between workers and peasants, urban and rural areas,
mental and manual labour — left over from the old society and inevitably existing
in the socialist society — as well as the remnants of unequal bourgeois rights
which are the reflection of these differences, will gradually vanish, the
function of the state will be limited to protecting the country from external
aggression; it will play no role in domestic affairs. By that time Chinese
society will enter the era of communism, the era when the principle “from each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs” will be realized. (DC, 418-22) |
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