The Great Leap Forward - Failures
- Created by: sammilaw
- Created on: 24-11-14 19:59
View mindmap
- The Great Leap Forward 1958 - 1962
- Failures
- Backyard furnaces
- Spring 1959
- Deforestation - trees needed as fuel
- Household items melted for steel
- Mass mobilisation
- Agriculture declined - farmers were occupied elsewhere
- Created useless blobs of steel
- Sparrowcide
- 1957-1958
- Reduced harvest
- Lysenkoism
- The Soviet researcher's theories which Mao followed
- Claimed to have techniques that would produce 16 times more crops than traditional methods
- Agricultural Failure
- False production figures submitted by the cadres
- Tax calculated on false figures = most crops were taken away for cities
- Peasants in the countryside starved
- Tax calculated on false figures = most crops were taken away for cities
- Grain still taken to pay debts to other countries (USSR - 1950 agreement)
- Party Cadres made the rules
- Distributed food - could withhold food from those who did not work
- Violent and abusive towards peasants
- Political and sexual exploitation
- Mao was willing to sacrifice the peasants to feed the cities
- False production figures submitted by the cadres
- Industrial Failure
- Lacked: technical skills, managerial know-how, efficiently run factories & adequate transport system
- CCP officials issued demand & threats but hardly any instructions on how things were meant to be done
- USSR involvement
- June 1950
- Stopped providing technical assistance
- Resulted in the closure of half the 300 industrial plants that the USSR had sponsered
- Mao's weaknesses
- Tended to blame failure on the bourgeois elements or those administering the policies
- Limited in his understanding of agricultural and industrial processes
- Simply believed China could achieve advanced industrialisation by mas deployment of manpower
Comments
No comments have yet been made