Mao’s China · CHAPTER 8 ·
Recovery after the Great Leap
Chapter 8 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976: “Retreat and Recovery”
After the famine Mao stepped back, and from 1961 Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun ran a pragmatic retreat, restoring private plots, rural markets and pay by results. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in January 1962 Liu called the disaster mostly man-made, and Mao resented the retreat in private.
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The map above is the world of China, October 1964 — The bomb, the Third Front and the Soviet rift.
Part of IB History: The People’s Republic under Mao →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The famine forced the Communist Party, the single party that ran every level of government, to retreat from the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s failed drive of 1958, and the success of that retreat set the leaders who managed it on a collision course with Mao. Mao stepped back from daily government and left it to three men: Liu Shaoqi, now head of state; Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s general secretary, who ran its daily business much like a chief operating officer; and the economist Chen Yun. They restored private plots and rural markets, paid peasants by results again, and in parts of Anhui even let households farm their own fields. These were pragmatic measures, judged by whether they produced food, much like a company dropping a failed strategy for whatever works. At a conference of some 7,000 officials in January 1962, Liu told them the disaster had been mostly man-made. By 1965 grain output was back at its 1957 level, and on the map every province is solid red again, because the campaigns, the Party’s bursts of mass mobilisation against named enemies, had paused. The retreat had worked, and that success was exactly what made Mao distrust the men who ran it.
Mao saw the retreat as the first step towards “revisionism”, his word for abandoning revolution while keeping its name, a charge much like heresy in a church. He believed it had already happened in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. From September 1962 he insisted that the Party must “never forget class struggle”, his doctrine that hidden enemies of the revolution survived inside society and even inside the Party, so politics remained a permanent war. He launched a Socialist Education Movement, a campaign to purge village officials. Through Defence Minister Lin Biao he also built a cult of his own thought in the army, a worship of the leader much like the cult of Stalin, spread through the Little Red Book, a pocket collection of his quotations. Foreign danger reshaped the economy too. As the United States escalated in Vietnam and the Soviet border grew hostile, Mao ordered the Third Front, a vast programme to rebuild industry in the remote interior, much as Britain once moved factories away from bombing in wartime; it is outlined in bronze on the map. In October 1964 China tested its first atomic bomb. The recovery made China stronger, while it convinced Mao that the Party itself had become the enemy.
The full story
The retreat from the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s failed drive of 1958 that ended in famine, worked because leaders finally saw the countryside for themselves. In the spring of 1961 Liu Shaoqi, head of state and second only to Mao in the Communist Party that ran every level of government, spent 44 days in rural Hunan and found empty granaries and peasants who blamed the disaster on officials and their orders. The mess halls closed, farming units shrank to the production team of a few dozen households, and peasants could again raise pigs, tend private plots and sell at markets. In Anhui its leader Zeng Xisheng allowed “responsibility fields”, in which a household contracted to farm a plot and kept what it produced above a quota, much like a tenant who pays a fixed rent and keeps the rest. Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s general secretary, defended such methods in July 1962 with a Sichuan proverb: it does not matter whether a cat is yellow or black, as long as it catches mice. Food production recovered quickly because peasants again had a reason to work hard.
Mao accepted the retreat in public and resented it in private. At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference of January–February 1962, the largest working meeting of officials in the Party’s history, he made a self-criticism, saying that as chairman he bore responsibility for the centre’s errors. Liu’s verdict of “three parts natural disaster, seven parts man-made” hung over the meeting. By the summer Mao was attacking household farming as a road back to capitalism. In September he told the Central Committee, the Party’s ruling council of about two hundred, roughly its national executive, to “never forget class struggle”, his doctrine that hidden enemies survived inside society and even inside the Party. The Socialist Education Movement of 1963–66 sent work teams of outside officials to purify village leaderships, and in January 1965 Mao named its real target: “those in authority within the Party taking the capitalist road”. Meanwhile the defence minister, Lin Biao, built a cult of personality, the organised worship of a living leader familiar from Stalin’s Soviet Union, through the Little Red Book of Mao’s quotations and the model soldier Lei Feng. The cult was built where Mao’s power was most secure.
The map’s new features are defensive, and they show how China’s leaders read the world after 1962. The Soviet Union and Mongolia are blue, India has been blue since the border war of 1962, and in August 1964 the United States began bombing North Vietnam. Mao feared an attack on the coastal and north-eastern industry built in the 1950s, so he ordered a Third Front of factories, mines and railways in the interior, “close to the mountains, dispersed and hidden”, much as Britain once moved factories away from bombing in wartime. The bronze outline marks it, and the arrows show steel moving from Anshan to Panzhihua, Shanghai plants to Guizhou and Sichuan, and car-making from Changchun to Shiyan. At Lop Nur in October 1964 China exploded its first atomic bomb. The country was recovering from famine by preparing for war.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Two roads out of the famine
The recovery split the leadership because it raised a question of principle: how far could the Party retreat from the commune before socialism itself was abandoned? Roderick MacFarquhar’s third volume of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution traces the argument through 1962. Chen Yun proposed fixing farm output quotas at the household level, Deng Zihui reported that household contracting raised yields, and Mao’s own secretary Tian Jiaying returned from Hunan recommending it. In Anhui, Zeng Xisheng’s responsibility fields spread to most production teams in 1961. At Beidaihe in August 1962 Mao condemned the practice as “going it alone” and a return to individual farming, and Zeng Xisheng and Deng Zihui were removed from their posts. The responsibility fields were reversed, and the collectives survived until 1978, when the farmers of Xiaogang, in the same province, revived the idea in secret. The episode shows that the economic solution adopted after Mao’s death had been known, tried and rejected by 1962 for political reasons.
Building the cult in the barracks
The cult of Mao that exploded in 1966 was assembled earlier and deliberately, mainly through the army, and Daniel Leese’s study Mao Cult traces how. After replacing Peng Dehuai in 1959, Lin Biao made the study of Mao’s writings the core of political training, and the army’s General Political Department compiled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong in May 1964 as a pocket book that soldiers could memorise. Lei Feng, a young soldier who died in an accident in 1962, became the model of selfless loyalty in March 1963 through a published diary and a large set of photographs. In 1964 the whole country was told to “learn from the People’s Liberation Army”, and political departments on the army’s model were set up in ministries and factories. The cult served Mao as an independent base of authority that did not depend on the Party machine Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping controlled. When Mao later turned on the Party, the army’s cult supplied the language, the books and the loyalty.
The Third Front: security and cost
The Third Front was hidden for decades, and only since the 1980s have historians been able to measure it. Barry Naughton’s pioneering study described it as a purposive, centrally directed programme of development and showed that, apart from oil, it was effectively the government’s whole industrial policy between 1965 and 1971. Covell Meyskens’s Mao’s Third Front, based on archives and interviews, adds the human story: millions of workers, engineers and soldiers moved to remote valleys in Sichuan, Guizhou, Shaanxi and Gansu, often living in temporary housing and cut off from their families. The principle of placing plants close to mountains, dispersed and hidden in caves made them safer from bombing and far more expensive to run. Naughton concluded that much of the investment was wasted, because factories stood far from raw materials, markets and each other. Yet the programme also gave the interior railways, power stations and industrial cities such as Panzhihua and Mianyang that still matter today, so its legacy remains debated.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The famine could no longer be denied. The evidence of mass death from places such as Xinyang had reached Beijing by 1960–61 through the Party’s own investigators, and grain had to be imported from Canada and Australia. In May 1962 some 60,000 hungry people crossed from Guangdong into Hong Kong in a few weeks, along the short arrow on the map, and most were caught and sent back. The leadership had to restore food production quickly or face a collapse of the countryside, and that urgency gave the pragmatists room to change policy faster than ideology would normally have allowed.
Pragmatists in charge of the economy. Mao had given up the post of head of state to Liu Shaoqi in 1959 and withdrew further from daily government after the famine, so the recovery was run by Liu, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai. They judged policies by results, used material incentives and relied on experts, and their authority grew with every good harvest. The success of their approach was itself a political threat, because it implied that Mao’s methods had failed.
Mao’s fear of revisionism. Mao watched Khrushchev denounce Stalin, promise Soviet citizens “goulash communism” and seek better relations with the United States, and he concluded that capitalism could return inside a Communist party through its own leaders. The Chinese polemics against Moscow in 1963–64 made this argument in public. Mao began to see Liu Shaoqi’s policies at home as the same disease, and the Socialist Education Movement was his first attempt to cure it.
Enemies on several borders. China faced enemies on several sides at once between 1962 and 1964. It fought India, quarrelled openly with the Soviet Union, watched Mongolia side with Moscow, and saw the United States bomb North Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964. Mao feared a war in which American or Soviet bombers would destroy the industry of the coast and the north-east, and that fear drove the Third Front and the rush to build an atomic bomb.
THE TURNING POINT
The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, January 1962. The conference was the hinge because the frankness that made the recovery possible also convinced Mao that his colleagues might one day repudiate him. Liu Shaoqi told more than 7,000 officials that the disaster was mostly man-made, and many speakers criticised the Leap openly for the first time since Lushan. Mao accepted responsibility in general terms, then spent the next four years building the means to fight back. Within months he was attacking household farming, and by 1965 he had defined his target as Party leaders on the “capitalist road”. The Cultural Revolution’s first victims were chosen in the aftermath of this meeting.
What it changed
Mao turns on the Party. The Socialist Education Movement and the Twenty-three Articles of January 1965 pointed Mao’s suspicion at “power-holders” inside the Party. In 1966 he bypassed the Party machine entirely and called on students to attack it, and Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, the architects of the recovery, became the Cultural Revolution’s chief targets. Liu was expelled from the Party in 1968 and died in custody the following year.
A cult ready to be used. The Little Red Book was in every soldier’s pocket by 1966, and Lei Feng’s diary in every school. When Red Guards rose that summer, they drew their slogans, their certainty and their sense that loyalty to Mao overrode loyalty to the Party from the cult that Lin Biao had built in the army. The man who built the cult became its most prominent beneficiary, and then its most prominent casualty.
Industry hidden in the mountains. The Third Front shifted a large share of China’s new industry into the interior between 1965 and 1971. It left behind steel at Panzhihua, vehicle works at Shiyan, defence plants around Chongqing and new railways such as the Chengdu–Kunming line, and it bound thousands of families to remote towns for a generation. Its costs and its legacies are still argued over.
A baby boom after the famine. Once food returned, births surged: the birth rate reached about 43 per thousand in 1963, the highest in the history of the People’s Republic, and the population passed 700 million by the mid-1960s. That boom created the huge generation of young people who filled the schools in 1966, and it later pushed the state towards the birth-planning campaigns of the 1970s and the one-child policy of 1980.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Why did the recovery of 1961–65 lead to the Cultural Revolution instead of to lasting reform?
The recovery worked, and that was the problem. Private plots, markets, smaller accounting units and household contracting restored food production by 1965, but each measure looked to Mao like a step back towards capitalism, and each success strengthened Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who had managed it. Mao still held the Party chairmanship, the loyalty of the army through Lin Biao, and the power to define what counted as socialist. Historians weigh his motives differently. MacFarquhar and others stress power and fear: Mao believed his colleagues would denounce him after his death as Khrushchev had denounced Stalin. Meisner and Walder give more weight to conviction, since Mao genuinely believed that bureaucrats and incentives were creating a new privileged class. The two readings fit together, because Mao saw his own authority and the revolution as one thing. The recovery therefore became the evidence for the prosecution in 1966. The lesson for students of authoritarian rule is that a leader who keeps control of the army and the ideology can reverse a successful reform led by others.
An interesting fact
Mao complained in June 1965 that the Ministry of Health worked only for the urban fifteen percent of the population and should be renamed the “Ministry of Urban Gentlemen’s Health”. The answer to his complaint was the barefoot doctor, a peasant given a few months of training who worked in the fields between patients; the name came from rice farmers who worked barefoot in flooded paddies. By the late 1970s more than a million served China’s villages, and the World Health Organization held up the scheme as a model of primary care at its 1978 conference in Alma-Ata.
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