Why did China’s recovery end in the Cultural Revolution?

The short answer

• 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.

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.