The Chinese Way: Mark One

Abstract

The Chinese Communist Party under Mao’s leadership decided to strike out in a new direction in 1958, largely as a result of concern over the effectiveness of the Soviet model for the development of China. The change was also occasioned by the tightening of general discipline in the wake of the Hundred Flowers movement of mid-1957. 1958 had been scheduled as the first year of the Second Five Year Plan, but instead witnessed a change of approach involving a Great Leap Forward and the creation of communes. This change placed enormous confidence in the aroused masses of China to achieve rapid economic advance at the behest of Mao, who may also have seen the communes as a way to bypass the Party bureaucrats in his bid for continued real authority in China. Although the Great Leap was disastrously unsuccessful in raising medium-term output, the institutions it spawned and the ideological problems its failure engendered were to be at the core of China’s politics for a decade, while the nation looked steadfastly inwards for the sources of modernisation. The retreat from the Great Leap marked the first outright setback for the CCP since the events of 1927 and 1934, but whereas those setbacks had resulted in major personnel changes in the CCP leadership, 1959 saw the punishment of only the critics of the Great Leap, not its advocates.