How far was Mao responsible for the Great Leap’s failure?

The short answer

• The easy victory of collectivisation. Collectivisation had been completed in eighteen months without the famine that followed Stalin’s, and the irrigation campaign of the winter of 1957–58 mobilised tens of millions of peasants. These successes convinced Mao that organisation and enthusiasm could achieve in months what planners expected to take years. The co-operatives also provided the units that could be merged into communes, and the officials who had raced to enrol villages in 1955 were ready to race again.
• Overtaking Britain. Rivalry inside the Communist world gave the Leap its deadline. At the Moscow conference of Communist parties in November 1957, Khrushchev claimed that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in fifteen years, and Mao answered that China would overtake Britain in steel in the same time. Rivalry within the Communist world turned this into a race, and in 1958 the target date was brought forward again and again. Steel output became the symbol by which success was measured.
• A Party that had silenced its critics. The Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 had removed or frightened the economists, engineers and journalists who might have challenged impossible targets. Within the Party, Mao’s attack on Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun for “opposing rash advance” in January 1958 showed that even the most senior leaders could be humiliated for caution, so nobody at any level had an incentive to say that a target was impossible. Silence at the top was copied at every level below, where the penalties for doubt were harsher still.
• Mao’s faith in human will. Mao’s revolutionary experience in Yan’an had taught him that a determined, well-organised people could defeat stronger enemies. He applied the same belief to the economy, holding that “politics in command” and mass mobilisation could replace capital, machinery and expertise. Ideas such as close planting and deep ploughing, borrowed from discredited Soviet agronomy, were imposed everywhere as proof that revolutionary methods beat conventional science. Agronomists who objected had often been labelled rightists the year before, so the scientific check on the policy was already gone.

What it changed

The Great Famine. With grain quotas set on false harvests, private food abolished and the mess halls running out, the countryside began to starve in the winter of 1958–59, and after Lushan the requisitions were pressed harder. Between 1959 and 1961 somewhere between 15 and 45 million people died, the largest famine in recorded history. The provinces whose leaders had been most zealous in 1958 suffered most.

Lin Biao takes the army. Peng Dehuai’s fall made Lin Biao defence minister, and Lin built his position by promoting the study of Mao’s thought throughout the army, culminating in the Little Red Book of quotations in 1964. The cult that the Cultural Revolution unleashed was first organised in the barracks after Lushan, and by 1969 Lin stood as Mao’s named successor. Two years later Mao turned against him, suspecting that the army’s new power threatened his own.

Mao on the second line. Mao’s retreat to what he called the “second line”, leaving daily government to colleagues, handed them the management of the crisis. In April 1959 he had given up the post of head of state to Liu Shaoqi, saying he wished to concentrate on theory. When the famine forced a retreat, Liu, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun ran it, which gave them authority Mao came to resent and set up the struggle of 1966. The famine’s managers became the Cultural Revolution’s targets.

Khrushchev’s scorn. Khrushchev mocked the communes in public in 1959, and Mao suspected that Peng Dehuai had discussed his criticisms with Soviet leaders during a visit to Eastern Europe that spring. The Leap thus deepened the quarrel with Moscow, and in 1960 the Soviet experts were withdrawn. Each side read the other’s policies as a betrayal of the revolution, and the alliance never recovered.