Was China’s First Five-Year Plan a success, and for whom?

The short answer

• The war closed every other door. The Korean War left China under an American trade embargo and dependent on Soviet weapons, loans and advice. With Western technology out of reach, the Soviet Union was the only source of the blueprints, machine tools and engineers that industrialisation required, and Moscow agreed to help build 156 major projects. The alliance therefore decided the shape of China’s economy as well as its foreign policy, because a factory built to a Soviet design also needed Soviet parts, training and planning methods.
• A Marxist faith in heavy industry. The Party believed that a socialist country needed steel, coal, electricity and machines before anything else, both to create a working class and to defend itself. The Soviet example seemed to prove that a backward country could industrialise in a generation through central planning, so heavy industry received the great majority of industrial investment, and consumer goods and agriculture were left to wait. The choice meant that ordinary living standards would rise slowly, which the leaders accepted as the price of national strength.
• Grain was the bottleneck. Industrialisation meant more city workers to feed and more food to export in payment for Soviet machines. When private grain markets failed to deliver enough in 1953, the state imposed its monopoly on buying and selling grain, which let it set low prices and quotas. Collectives then made the monopoly easier to enforce, because the state could deal with a few hundred thousand co-operatives instead of over a hundred million households.
• Mao’s impatience with gradualism. Mao grew frustrated with planners and rural officials who wanted to move slowly after 1953, when he replaced New Democracy with a “general line” for the transition to socialism. His July 1955 speech attacked caution as a political error, and officials, who had learned in the campaigns that overfulfilment was safe, competed to enrol villages. The pace of change was set by the leader’s will and by the incentives of the system he had built.

What it changed

The Leap forward from the Plan. The Plan succeeded in industry and left agriculture lagging, and Mao concluded that the Soviet model was too slow and too bureaucratic for China. His answer, from 1958, was to mobilise labour instead of capital and to combine farming and industry in giant communes. The co-operatives of 1956 became the building blocks of the communes two years later, and the officials who had raced to collectivise raced again.

The state could now take the harvest. The grain monopoly and the collectives gave the state the power to decide how much food each village kept. In normal years this fed the cities and paid for imports. In 1959–60, when officials took grain on the basis of inflated harvest reports, the same machinery stripped villages bare and turned a policy failure into famine. The tools built to feed industry became the tools that starved the producers.

Two classes of citizen. The work-unit system and the 1958 household registration rules divided China into city people, with rations, pensions and health care, and rural people, who had to feed themselves from collective fields and could not move to the cities. The divide between urban and rural China created in these years outlasted Mao by decades, and it decided who lived and who died when food ran short in 1960.

Soviet ties that became a burden. China’s factories, schools and planning offices were built on Soviet designs and staffed with Soviet advisers. When the alliance broke down in 1960 and the experts left, unfinished plants and missing blueprints showed how deep the dependence had been, and the split forced China to improvise its own path. Self-reliance, later praised as a virtue, began as a necessity, and the Lanzhou uranium plant finished by Chinese engineers in 1964 became its proudest example.