100 Flowers Campaign & The Great Leap Forward:

*Cooperatives

Pooling of land and labor

Small private plots

740,000 Cooperatives formed

900 people/coop

Propaganda poster: "Agricultural collectivization is the socialist path that makes everybody prosperous" (Skaff modified translation, 1956)

Economic pluses and minuses

Economies of scale

Plot boundaries eliminated

Labor mobilization

Social safety net

Disincentives to production

Moral incentives and social ostracism to encourage work

No rewards for extra work

3.8% rise in agricultural production, 1st 5-year plan, 1953-57

Mao, "Continuing Revolution," Jan. 1958 (Spence, p. 517)

Propaganda poster: “Ride the wind and brave the waves; Everyone has remarkable abilities” (Skaff modified translation, 1958)

Heavy industry production increase goals, 1958

Steel 19%, Electricity 18%, Coal 17%

*Backyard blast furnaces

Steel production

5.35 million tons, 1957
18 million tons, 1960
7 million tons, post-1960

26,000 Communes

Larger scale (25,000 members av.)

Formerly 740,000 cooperatives

No more private gardens, livestock, or houses

Goal

Increased production

Means

Mass mobilization, moral incentives

Successes

Public works projects

Education and social services in countryside

Great Famine

Per capita annual grain consumption in the countryside (figures from Spence, p. 523):

156 kilos=catastrophic

Death estimates, 1959-1962

16 to 30 million people dead

Factors

Loan repayments to Soviet Union for heavy machinery

Severe drought in 1959

Lack of incentive to increase grain production

20% of peasants shifted to industrial work

Bureaucratic problems

Fear of speaking truth

Fear of not following orders

Propaganda

Propaganda poster: "The Vegetables are Green, Melons Plump, Harvest Abundant" (Skaff modified translation, 1959)