Blog 4

Dear Comrades, 

It has been a few years since I last wrote an entry informing you on what is happening in the countryside of China. At this point, land reform has been well on the way but hasn’t been the most successful. Mao continues to try to build the country and make the peasants better off. However, his next major move of making “The Great Leap” isn’t going exactly as planned. It may even seem that the country is falling off the path they might have seemed to be on. The concept of the Chinese communes were failing in multiple ways from the top down. This was a direct consequence of the attempt of having immediate progress with the campaigns Mao implemented.

The increase in production and labor that Mao envisioned was not a balanced or a realistic feat that the Chinese peasants could handle (Peng, 438). The communes were failing as it resulted in divorcing the peasants from reality and the masses would lose its support for the party. This not only created starvation but divided the party and their families.The local cadres and leaders were also corrupt in this way as they would lie about the crop production because of the pressure to repay the debt which made the peasants lose even more trust about the party. Collectivations were expected to increase their production and by having unrealistic goals, the campaign would fail miserably. With Mao’s Anti-rightist campaign, it was a crime to speak out against the party or to seek the truth about how the country was doing (Xun 30). These leaders would keep their collectivization so closed off that the people of a community would believe that they were going through a poor harvesting season, instead of seeing that the whole country was in the same situation. The party leaders who were higher up even ignored protests when people did speak out about their situations which is a huge issue if there was any chance of change in the foreseeable future. Later in 1959, the Anti-hiding campaign was launched in the countryside to prevent the peasants from concealing grain amounts, concealing labor, and withholding labor (Xun 37). Not only did it encourage cadres to promote violence in the countryside, but it turned peasants against peasants which created even more of an issue.

Mao, with the help of Soviet Union funding, had attempted to turn the country into an industrialized nation. There was a focus on the production of steel and cultivating more cotton instead of crops to feed the nation. Mao would also implement new farming methods which called to plough deeper and to plant more seeds close to each other. People would turn to eating mud and tree bark as substitutes for food (Xun, 5). To meet the government procurement quotas, rice and grain were taken right from the Chinese peasants to repay the debt, which created even more starvation within the nation. In terms of steel production, peasants were forced to break down useful tools which would inevitably be useless to the Chinese (Sue, 48 mins). This was a result of not having Deaths rising  and women were not able to even give birth or breastfeed because of the malnourishment of their bodies. The poverty throughout the whole country was so bad that families began to sell their children to support themselves to get through the next week (Xun 9). Mao’s campaign to eliminate the four pests also backfired on him. He believed that by eliminating sparrows, rats, mosquitoes, and flies would allow the harvest to flourish. However, by creating a propaganda to eliminate the sparrows, the insects ran rampant and would destroy much of the crops. 

With all the negative aspects of the Great Leap, we can still believe in Mao to create a better life for the average Chinese citizen. Within all revolutions, there are shortcomings that can be addressed and learned from. I believe once the party finds a way to be transparent about the situation, it will regain the trust of the peasants and it can build a strong community. The muddled vision of strategic goals and concrete measures have affected which decision the party has made to attempt to make the country better. Instead of trying to make big changes immediately, it would be a better option to strive for gradual growth that would make a more impactful change for the future.