China History & Travel Playlist:
CIA evaluation of the Chinese society and economy at the beginning of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958). “This film explores the industry and culture of the cities of Tianjin and Beijing.”
Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
The Great Leap Forward (Chinese: 大跃进; pinyin: Dà yuè jìn) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social campaign by the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1958 to 1961. The campaign was led by Mao Zedong and aimed to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a socialist society through rapid industrialization and collectivization. However, it is widely considered to have caused the Great Chinese Famine.
Chief changes in the lives of rural Chinese included the incremental introduction of mandatory agricultural collectivization. Private farming was prohibited, and those engaged in it were persecuted and labeled counter-revolutionaries. Restrictions on rural people were enforced through public struggle sessions and social pressure, although people also experienced forced labor. Rural industrialization, officially a priority of the campaign, saw “its development… aborted by the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward.”
The Great Leap ended in catastrophe, resulting in tens of millions of deaths, estimated from 18 million to 32.5 or 46 million. Historian Frank Dikötter asserts that “coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward” and it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history”.
The years of the Great Leap Forward actually saw economic regression, with 1958 through 1962 being the only period between 1953 and 1985 in which China’s economy shrank. Political economist Dwight Perkins argues, “enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all. … In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster.”
In subsequent conferences in March 1960 and May 1962, the negative effects of the Great Leap Forward were studied by the CPC, and Mao was criticized in the party conferences. Moderate Party members like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping rose to power, and Mao was marginalized within the party, leading him to initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
Pro-communist sources dispute the number of deaths in the Great Chinese Famine and deny that it was caused by the Great Leap Forward, saying the campaign was successful in its aim to accelerate state industrialisation…
By 1958 private ownership was entirely abolished and households all over China were forced into state-operated communes. Mao insisted that the communes must produce more grain for the cities and earn foreign exchange from exports. These reforms (sometimes now referred to as The Great Leap Forward) were generally unpopular with the peasants and usually implemented by summoning them to meetings and making them stay there for days and sometimes weeks until they “voluntarily” agreed to join the collective.
Apart from progressive taxation on each household’s harvest, the state introduced a system of compulsory state purchases of grain at fixed prices to build up stockpiles for famine-relief and meet the terms of its trade agreements with the Soviet Union. Together, taxation and compulsory purchases accounted for 30% of the harvest by 1957, leaving very little surplus. Rationing was also introduced in the cities to curb ‘wasteful consumption’ and encourage savings…
