The Lingering Great Leap

Dear Tongzhimen,

The Great Leap Forward had incredibly noble goals, and by all national Party accounts, it was able to deliver upon many of those. Land has been collectivized, grain procurement quotas have been on the rise in most rural areas, and our great nation has moved towards industrialization. The Chairman’s goal of surpassing Great Britain’s level of steel production, a concept which was only a distant dream a few short years ago, moved within our grasp. However, whispers of tragedies – ones that are almost too horrible to name – befalling the people of China have also swirled about. I received an assignment to travel to as many different provinces as possible in order to get a clearer picture of the realities that people are facing, in the city and in the countryside alike. Exports and the Party’s grain procurement quotas have risen steadily over the past three years, so I expected to find a countryside of abundance. As I traveled from village to village, collecting testimonies and reading documents, however, I was confronted with stark conditions I found that some areas of our great nation have been plagued by chronic crop failure, violence, corruption, disease, famine, death, and suffering, and my heart breaks for the areas affected by this turmoil [Zhou Xun, 3]. I believe that the Chairman and the Party will lead all members of our society back to prosperity in due time, yet after witnessing local conditions firsthand, I also have some worries that certain consequences of the manner in which the Great Leap was implemented will linger on for years to come.

Family life and the lives of children have been disrupted immensely in the past three years, and I believe that the disruption of the lives of China’s new generation will have a reverberating impact on our nation for many years to come. In January of 1959, a report about conditions in Gaoguanzhai township, Zhangqiu county stated that “many villagers had no choice but to abandon their homes and become beggars. Some had no other option but to sell their children” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 1, Page 4]. Families have been displaced from their homes, children have been displaced from their parents, and such a destruction of the familial unit will impact China’s demographic and social realities for decades to come.

Due to malnutrition, many women of childbearing age in Gaoguanzhai have stopped menstruating, babies have been born with serious birth defects, and babies have starved to death because their mothers quickly stopped producing milk to breastfeed them with [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 1, Page 6]. Furthermore, surviving babies and children are subjected to heartbreaking neglect. One of the core aims of the Great Leap Forward was to mobilize all members of the community, including women, to work outside of the home on localized agricultural or industrial projects. Mao has previously said that “the youth and women are happy about the new…system,” but the stories I heard from women and children about the disastrous impacts of mobilizing mothers to work without providing any systematic form of childcare paint a drastically different picture [Mao, Talks at Beidaihe, 164]. As a report on relief work in Sichuan Province from 1961 states, “since the Great Leap Forward, many women have been encouraged to go into full-time employment, leaving a number of children at home with no one to care for them…Some children were simply left to crawl on their own and to find food to eat from the floor” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 23, Page 53]. In 1962, children in Chongqing city developed myriad health problems, including parasitic diseases, as well as over 167,000 children cases of malnutrition or rickets, caused by a combination of poor diets and a lack of exposure to sunlight, since “mothers lock up their children indoors because they have to go to work” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 23, Page 54].

Orphaned children in particular face perilous and harrowing conditions. At the Gaoling district orphanage, employees “failed to feed the orphans regular meals, leaving the children starving” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 16, Page 48]. Out of desperation, some orphans “regularly… [rummaged] around local market restaurants for leftovers. Some also went to look for wild grass, dead fish, shrimp, and toads to eat,” causing several deaths from food poisoning [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 16, Page 48]. Stories from the Hongqi orphanage indicate widespread physical abuse of orphaned children [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 16, Page 48]. Some families in Yinging offered orphans in need of a roof over their heads a place to stay, only to “[deprive] them of food, [beat] them, [scold] them, and [eat] up the orphan’s grain ration” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 18, Page 49]. All of these accounts of women and children being subjected to inhumane conditions during the past three years leave me worried that we have failed the up and coming generations.

I am also immensely worried about the long term consequences of a collapse of a trusting peasant and cadre relationship, an issue which has befallen many villages due to blatant cadre abuses. I learned from an old friend located in Wanxian county that local cadres “unlawfully set up private courts, jails, and labor camps,” and employed cruel methods of torture which are essentially beyond one’s worst imagination [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 3, Page 21]. Reports from other villages have painted a similar picture. According to a 1959 report from Guangdong province, for instance, “‘private prisons’ run by the commune are widespread in many regions. In most cases these private prisons are used to deal with ‘the people’ rather than ‘the enemy’” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 7, Page 28]. I am immensely worried about the idea that cadres are shattering their relationships with the common people by ruthlessly abusing them, because this could lead to a general lack of trust in the Party and its policies in the future and a complete deterioration of the mass line.

The distribution of valuable labor and resources during the Great Leap Forward is also something which alarms me, as it has the potential to negatively impact our nation’s economic health and growth in the years to come. After seeing the barren fields in many parts of the Chinese countryside with my own eyes, I have come to the grim conclusion that local cadres have repeatedly inflated their harvests in their reports, painting a false picture of prosperity for the leaders at the top of the Party [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 43, Page 87]. Despite the need for China to devote significant time, resources, and labor to the agricultural sector if it wants to produce an abundance of food for its people, agricultural production has generally fallen by the wayside in terms of Party priorities – “agricultural land became wasteland, and unattended livestock died” [Zhou Xun, Page 73]. In recent years, the Party very enthusiastically mobilized people to work in heavy industry production, sometimes to the detriment of other invaluable industries, especially agriculture and consumer goods [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 40, Page 83].

Even though significant resources have been devoted to industrial production, I heard many accounts that these resources have not been allocated as efficiently as they should have been. In July of 1959, Peng Dehuai lamented this lack of carefully coordinated planning, writing, “an excessive number of capitalist construction projects were hastily started in 1958. With part of the funds being dispersed, completion of some essential projects had to be postponed” [Peng Dehuai, 436]. China’s overall steel production has increased significantly over the past few years, but there are a few vital questions we need to ask ourselves: where are the raw materials used to produce this steel coming from, and what are we gaining from this increased production? An investigative report from 1961 in Yongxing, Qi County found that useful household items were melted down and used in industrial production: “peasants were told to ‘contribute’ their private property, including pots and pans, jars, and coffins during the iron- and steel-work campaign” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 31, Page 75]. The steel that was produced had little to no practical usage, yet people from across the entire nation were still instructed to create backyard steel furnaces of their own. Peng Dehuai reflected that “in the nationwide campaign for the production of iron and steel, too many small blast furnaces were built with a waste of material, money, and manpower” [Peng Dehuai, 437].

Hastily conceived and poorly planned construction projects, the emphasis on rapid industrialization, and the neglect of the agricultural sector have all combined to have a particularly virulent effect on China’s environment. Mao has long advocated for close planting and deep plowing techniques, which will have immensely detrimental repercussions on crop yields for years to come [Mao, Talks at Beidaihe, Page 162]. An illuminating report on the destruction of forestland in the northwest of China indicated that as of October 1962, one-fifth of closed forestland had been dilapidated, and as much as one-third of open forests had been chopped down [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 44, Page 88]. The report highlighted the deleterious effects of this deforestation as well, stating that “the destruction of the forest has caused soil erosion and sandstorms and reduced the amount of water resources” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 44, Page 88]. Due to poorly constructed irrigation systems and canals, some farm fields have become waterlogged and alkalized. In Hunan province, I spoke with a peasant who recited a local saying to me: “the drought happens for just one season, but alkalization will last a lifetime” [edited by Zhou Xun, Document 45, Page 89]. Some local implementations of the Great Leap have frankly wreaked havoc upon the landscape and the environment, and farmers will surely feel the effects of this for the foreseeable future.

While I have faith that Chairman Mao and the rest of the Party will get our nation back on track, I am saddened that so many people throughout China have experienced such destruction, disease, and death, and I worry about the impacts that this period will have on agricultural production and our youth. I hope all of my loyal readers have stayed safe and healthy during this treacherous time, weathering the storm that has afflicted our nation as of late. I look forward to writing again soon.

Sincerely, Lei Ju