Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward was a Chinese Communist Party campaign from 1958 to 1962 to collectivize agriculture and accelerate industrial production. Inflated output targets, coercive policies, and disrupted farming contributed to a catastrophic famine and economic collapse.

People's communes: Rural collective organizations in Mao-era China that combined agricultural production, administration, and social services. They replaced many households and cooperatives as the campaign's basic units of rural production.
Mao Zedong: Chinese communist revolutionary who led the People's Republic of China from its founding until 1976. Mao launched and defended the drive for rapid collectivization and industrial growth.
Liu Shaoqi: Chinese Communist leader who served as president of the People's Republic of China from 1959 to 1968. He helped lead the post-campaign recovery and later criticized policies behind the famine.
Lushan Conference: A 1959 meeting of Chinese Communist Party leaders where Peng Dehuai criticized Great Leap policies. Mao's response to Peng's letter hardened the campaign and suppressed internal criticism.
Soviet industrialization: The state-directed industrial transformation of the Soviet Union, especially under Joseph Stalin. It supplied a model of rapid industrialization, though China's campaign relied more on rural mass mobilization.
Backyard furnaces: Small, improvised furnaces used in China to produce steel during the Great Leap Forward. Their drive for rapid steel output diverted labor and fuel from farming and produced much unusable metal.
First Five-Year Plan: China's 1953–1957 economic plan, which prioritized state-led industrialization with substantial Soviet assistance. Its industrial gains set the pace Mao sought to exceed through mass mobilization.
Deng Xiaoping: Chinese Communist leader who became paramount leader after Mao's death and pursued market-oriented reforms. He participated in the leadership's correction of Great Leap policies and restoration of agricultural incentives.
Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee: A 1978 Chinese Communist Party meeting that initiated a shift toward economic reform and modernization. Its policy turn rejected the repeated mass campaigns associated with Mao-era economic upheaval.
New Economic Policy: A Soviet policy from 1921 that restored limited private trade and markets after wartime communism. It illustrates a retreat from coercive collectivization toward limited market incentives, unlike Mao's approach.

Linked from 30 pages