section_path: Leadership of China/Great Leap Forward
section_name: Great Leap Forward
paragraph_text: Great Leap Forward
  
  In January 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, to turn China from an agrarian nation to an industrialised one. The relatively small agricultural collectives that had been formed were merged into far larger people's communes, and many peasants were ordered to work on infrastructure projects and on the production of iron and steel. Some private food production was banned, and livestock and farm implements were brought under collective ownership.
  
  The effect of the diversion of labour to steel production and infrastructure projects, and cyclical natural disasters led to an approximately 15% drop in grain production in 1959 followed by a further 10% decline in 1960 and no recovery in 1961.
  
  To win favour with their superiors and avoid being purged, each layer in the party exaggerated the amount of grain produced under them. Based upon the falsely reported success, party cadres were ordered to requisition a high amount of that fictitious harvest. The result, compounded in some areas by drought and in others by floods, was that farmers were left with little food and many millions starved to death in the Great Chinese Famine. The people of urban areas were given food stamps each month, but the people of rural areas were expected to grow their own crops and give some of the crops back to the government. The death count in rural parts of China surpassed the deaths in the urban centers. The famine was a direct cause of the death of some 30 million Chinese peasants between 1959 and 1962. Many children who became malnourished.
  
  In late autumn 1958, Mao condemned the practices used during Great Leap Forward such as forcing peasants to do labour without enough food or rest which resulted in epidemics and starvation. He also acknowledged that anti-rightist campaigns were a major cause of "production at the expense of livelihood." He refused to abandon the Great Leap Forward, but he did demand that they be confronted. After the July 1959 clash at Lushan Conference with Peng Dehuai, Mao launched a new anti-rightist campaign along with the radical policies that he previously abandoned. It wasn't until the spring of 1960, that Mao would again express concern about abnormal deaths and other abuses, but he did not move to stop them. Bernstein concludes that the Chairman "wilfully ignored the lessons of the first radical phase for the sake of achieving extreme ideological and developmental goals".
  
  Mao stepped down as President of China on 27 April 1959; he retained other top positions such as Chairman of the Communist Party and of the Central Military Commission. The Presidency was transferred to Liu Shaoqi. Mao eventually abandon the policy in 1962. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping rescued the economy by disbanding the people's communes, introducing elements of private control of peasant smallholdings and importing grain from Canada and Australia to mitigate the worst effects of famine.
  
  At the Lushan Conference in July/August 1959, several ministers expressed concern that the Great Leap Forward had not proved as successful as planned. The most direct of these was Minister of Defence Peng Dehuai. Following Peng's criticism of the Great Leap Forward, Mao made a purge of Peng and his supporters, stifling criticism of the Great Leap policies. A campaign was launched and resulted in party members and ordinary peasants being sent to prison labour camps. Years later the CCP would conclude that as many as six million people were wrongly punished in the campaign.