I know it happened in China but there’s so many conflicting answers I don’t know what’s right, but I keep hearing it was bad. Why would anyone in China want to perform the Great Leap Forward if it was bad?
Reading that you found “conflicting” answers and hearing it was “bad”, it will be great if you first list what you have investigated so far. Otherwise, you leave us assuming too many things and make this very difficult to help you with an answer.
Um I heard there was something called backyard furnaces idk what that means? Did they really build steel furnaces in their backyard? That doesn’t sound like a good idea
Why would that be a bad idea? China needed to industrialize as quickly as possible and for this it needed a lot of steel. It could not produce that steel itself in factories on a sufficient scale because of the lacking level of industrialization. It was sort of a chicken and egg problem. You needed steel to build the factories but you needed the factories to make the steel.
Its only options therefore were either to import what they needed, which was not really possible without unacceptable concessions to foreign powers (by this point the relations with the Soviet Union had declined significantly, and of course the West wouldn’t help a communist state), or to use a decentralized/distributed approach employing cheap and technologically feasible artisanal production methods but scale things up by having millions of people do it simultaneously.
In this way they utilized two of their greatest strengths: the unparalleled ability of a communist party for mobilizing the masses toward a common goal, and the large population size of China. They were able to multiply an otherwise small scale process up to the enormous quantities needed to fuel their nascent industries.
Obviously the quality and consistency of the steel produced in this way was not up to that which you would get from industrial production, but it was good enough for the purpose. And what other choice did they have? This was a difficult period, but it was a necessary step on the road to industrialization without which China would not be where it is today.
The end result being that something which took the first industrial powers centuries to do, China did in the span of a less than a decade.
Well, these three sources may give you a rough idea of what it was:
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https://www.baike.com/wikiid/3055687199584291691?baike_source=doubao
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http://dangshi.people.com.cn/n/2014/0731/c85037-25377579-3.html
Also, this is a picture of it:
Do you know about the Cultural Revolution? I read a book and it seemed pretty positive about the whole thing, it was a book about industrial management and to me it seemed the changes they made such as increased work place democracy were good, was there more bad to it?
The Cultural Revolution had many good aspects to it but also many problematic parts. The main critique nowadays in China boils down to it having been fundamentally ultra-left in its conception. I don’t know if they have this saying in China but here in the West we would call it “putting the cart before the horse”. In essence, ultra-left errors consist in attempting to leapfrog necessary stages of development and trying to force society into modes of production for which the economic basis is yet too premature.
The collectivization and radical democratization initiatives that were attempted in the Cultural Revolution were a way of trying to establish the social and productive relations of full communism before the necessary productive forces for such an advanced stage existed. From the point of view of the CPC today this was dangerous mistake, because a communist government that is not careful and tries to advance faster than a society is ready for can cause significant damage to the society and lose the trust of the population.
The intention was of course noble, and we can greatly benefit from studying some of the revolutionary ways in which workplaces, communities, villages, etc. were organized and run during the Cultural Revolution. They put into practice many of the sorts of things that we will one day want to see implemented under full communism. Sadly, they were too ahead of their time. China still had a long way to go developing the material basis for a prosperous society and if it had failed to do so the communist party may well have been overthrown.
Thanks for being so thorough, cfgaussian! I was trying to come up with an answer as well but just couldn’t. It was a relief to see you answer!
Thanks but i think my answer barely scratched the surface. I didn’t even mention any of the cultural policies. This is a huge topic and there are so many interesting things that one could talk about. Entire books have been written on these subjects and i still have so much to learn.
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Frankly, do the results not speak for themselves? China went from an agrarian economy recovering from a brutal invasion and occupation to a industrial superpower in under 100 years. Of course not everything was done perfectly, but the level of scrutiny given to AES states imo is ridiculous. If China was a western state that had accomplished the same things and was capitalist it would be lauded as the model the rest of the world should emulate. Instead everyone nitpicks them constantly. Just keep that in mind when you see critisisms. They dont always come from a genuine place.
hm, I generally try to avoid blanket adjectives like “bad” for entire movements or events. at least for those with targets that aren’t obvious “we’re setting out to exploit people”
western propaganda likes to overexaggerate famine (yay atrocity propaganda), while one of the main concerns of GLF was land reform-agricultural reform (speaking of agricultural reform and development - i remember reading about xi jinping’s background/starting from the bottom of bureaucracy: he had a hand in agricultural reforms for his municipality that boosted yield.). Without hitting the books at this very moment, I’ve also heard the famine situation reframed as residual of the pattern of famines that were already starting to phase out as stability returned to china (coming out of a century of strife, occupation, and wars–conditions that prevent a largely agrarian society from being able to focus on tending crops) + agricultural developments were works in progress to deal with naturally occurring cycles of drought years and flood years. regarding agriculture x climate, the biggest progress is towards drought and disease resistance in crops, but afaik that’s closer to contemporary era than GLF
of course there were errors or mistakes made in GLF (also discussed by internal critiques and taught to future generations) but the gist and spirit of “we need to industrialize and catch up” was not considered an error. off the top of my head as an example, low quality iron produced in rural centers obviously short of goals towards quality steel production
I don’t know much about it. I would start here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
Why would anyone in China want to perform the Great Leap Forward if it was bad?
Does this question not seem rather absurd? Zeroth of all, people don’t generally do things that will be “bad” if they have the foreknowledge that it will turn out badly.
Here is a Chinese history book from 1994 with a large section on the Great Leap Forward.
