To create a Socialist Utopia: Dazhai Commune

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To create a Socialist Utopia Dazhai Commune
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• ORGANIZE POPULATION INTO PRODUCTION UNITS
• TOTAL CARE -- HEALTH,
• EDUCATION, WELFARE
• INSPIRE WITH CONTUNOUS
  IDEOLOGICAL WORK

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• Mao believed the country should focus on industry
  and food. Mao made a five year plan and called it
  The Great Leap Forward

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Great Leap Forward

• The Commune is Like a Mighty Dragon, Production
  is awe-inspiring

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Communes and Collectivization
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Great Leap Forward Second Five Year Plan
(1958-1962)

• Collectivization became the official policy.
  Chinas land was divided into 70,000 communes
• He hoped that it would help unemployment and
  cause a genuine communal unity
• He accused peasants of hiding grain and used
  force against them
• The food would be traded for money to buy weapons
  or used for fuel

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How did the Great Leap Forward affect China?

• Mao believed that both industry and agriculture
  had to grow to make the other work. The industry
  had to be well fed to be good industry workers,
  and agriculture needed industry to make good
  tools for them.
• In order to make the industry and agriculture
  grow, China was reformed into a series of
  communes.
• A commune is a relatively small, often rural
  community whose members share common interests,
  work, and income and often own property
  collectively.

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The Great Leap Forward

• Maos second Five-Year Plan is known as the Great
  Leap Forward, and involved utilizing the massive
  amounts of human labor to avoid having to import
  industrial machinery.
• Who needs a bulldozer when youve got a few
  hundred people with shovels, right?
• Mao believed that steel and grain would make
  China great, and these endeavors were complete
  and total disasters.

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Great Leap Forward, 1958-60

• In 1958, Mao decided that the Russian strategy of
  industrial development was not suitable for
  China.
• This urban, large-factory system was not having
  enough of an impact on the mass of the population
  in the countryside.
• Mao decided to opt for a unique Chinese method of
  industrialization.

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THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD - THE COMMUNES

• Develop Agriculture as well as Industry
• Chinese Commune System - All Encompassing
  Collective Farm Work Units
• Purpose Releasing the Workers Tremendous Energy

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How? Peasants placed into communes Mass
mobilization
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THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD - THE COMMUNES

• The advantage of Peoples Communes lies in the
  fact that they combine industry, agriculture,
  commerce, education, and military affairs.
• - Mao
• Peoples Time Managed Effectively for Work
• Commune in Control of All Activities - Hierarchy
• Commune Creation Extremely Speedy - More than
  25,000 at end of 1958

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• Communes were made up of many families ( often as
  many as five thousand families)
• The commune owned everything, tools, animals, and
  land.
• People worked for the commune, not for
  themselves.
• The commune provided schools, nurseries and
  healthcare so workers could work instead of
  taking care of babies and older parents
• Would any of these things help your family?

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The Great Leap Forward

• Farming was further collectivized into larger
  farms called communes. 26,000 communes were
  created, each covering 15,000 square miles,
  supporting about 25,000 people each.
• Life on the communes was strictly controlled,
  peasants worked the land together, ate together
  in cafeterias, slept in communal dorms, and
  raised their kids in communal nurseries.

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• Propaganda posters often use symbolism
• The dragon in this picture symbolizes steel
  production
• The bird symbolizes grain production
• How does this poster make you feel?

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THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD - PROPAGANDA ENTHUSIASM

• Propaganda a Key Element
• Goal to Inspire Workers to Overachieve Goals
• Impressive Construction Projects Completed

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• Write at least two sentences that you think this
  poster might be saying.

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The Great Leap Forward

• Funerals, weddings, and religion were replaced
  with meetings and propaganda.
• Only work points, not pay, were awarded.
• Only the state profited from this labor, and
  peasants had no reason to work hard.
• Criticism of the commune would label you as
  dangerous, and escape was next to impossible.

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Effects of Communes
Economic difficulties Most peasants had
lost their incentives to produce ?get
everything in the people communes ?communal
eating halls provided the peasants with very
generous meals free of charge lower
productivity food crises, decline in
production, devaluation of money, high inflation
and a huge national deficit
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Effects Great Famine
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Causes of the Famine

• 1958 had particularly good weather for growing
  food. Party leaders claimed that the harvest for
  1958 was a record 260 million tons
• which was not true.
• Still the leaders over-reported their harvests to
  their superiors in Beijing, and what was thought
  to be surplus grain was sold abroad.

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The Famine

• What factors contributed to the famine of
  1959-62?
• Encouraged by expectations of a great leap in
  agricultural productivity from collectivization,
  the government diverted massive amounts of
  agricultural resources to industry and sharply
  raised grain procurement from the peasants,
  eventually leading to malnutrition among peasants
  and decimation of their labor productivity in
  growing next year's crops. The consecutive years
  of bad weather also aggravated the fatal economic
  policies. The decline in food availability was
  indeed a cause of the GLF famine. But other
  institutional factors, including urban bias in
  China's food distribution system, radical local
  policies, and grain exports, were also major
  contributors of the excess mortality. By and
  large, the GLF catastrophe was the result of a
  series of failures in central planning.
• While the inflated numbers reported by communes
  contributed to the famine, what is more
  disturbing is that the top CCP officials knew it
  was happening, and yet continued to take large
  portions of the grain yields.

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Causes of the Famine

• The excellent growing weather of 1958 was
  followed by a very poor growing year in 1959.
• Some parts of China were hit by floods.
• In other growing areas, drought was a major
  problem. The harvest for 1959 was 170 million
  tons of grain well below what China needed at
  the most basic level.
• In parts of China, starvation occurred.

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Results

• Famine!
• When there is not enough to eat people starve to
  death. It is better to let half of the people die
  so that the other half can eat their fill. -Mao

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The Famine

• 1960 had even worse weather than 1959.
• The harvest of 1960 was 144 million tons. 9
  million people are thought to have starved to
  death in 1960 alone many millions were left
  desperately ill as a result of a lack of food.
• The government had to introduce rationing.
• This put people on the most minimal of food and
  between 1959 and 1962, it is thought that 20
  million people died of starvation or diseases
  related to starvation.

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The Famine (con.)

• Estimates range from 30-45 million deaths it is
  the worst famine in recorded history
• 2-3 million of those were beaten to death or
  buried alive
• The power of the local cadres also played a
  role-they could deny food to anyone not on
  board with the GLF
• In 1962, having lost about ten million people in
  Sichuan, provincial leader Li Jingquan compared
  the Great Leap Forward to the Long March in which
  only one in ten had made it to the end We are
  not weak, we are stronger, we have kept the
  backbone

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???? - The Great Famine
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Birth Death Rates
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Great Sparrow Campaign
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Great Sparrow Campaign

• The Great Sparrow Campaign (?????) was part of
  Mao Zedongs Four Pests Campaign (?????, Chú Sì
  Hài Yùndòng).
• A part of the Great Leap Forward (???, Dà Yuèjìn)
  from 1958-1962, the goal of the Four Pests
  Campaign was to get rid of rats, flies,
  mosquitoes, and sparrows.
• Sparrows were considered pests because they ate
  grain seeds.
• Farmers were encouraged to tear down sparrows
  nests, break sparrow eggs, and bang pots and pans
  to scare sparrows away.
• Later, Chinas authorities discovered that
  sparrows actually prefer to eat insects rather
  than grain seed.
• More importantly, sparrows had served an
  important function in the farm ecology by eating
  locusts.

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Great Sparrow Campaign

• Illogical agricultural methods were used, such as
  overplanting. Mao believed the seeds of the same
  species would not compete, and higher harvests
  would result. Grain production actually fell.
• As part of the Great Leap, Mao also launched the
  Great Sparrow
• Campaign in which the Chinese
• people were encouraged to kill
• sparrows because it was believed that
• they ate the grain.

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Great Sparrow Campaign

• Sparrows eat insects. The kinds of insects that
  eat grain With no birds, the insect population
  exploded and Chinas crops were devastated.
• Officials were often pressured to lie about their
  to produce grain, resulting in communes being
  forced to sell more grain that they could afford
  to give.

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Great Sparrow Campaign

• Initially, the campaign did improve the harvest.
• While the sparrow population declined, the locust
  population grew
• Sparrows are a predator of the locusts in the
  food chain
• Locusts swarmed the country and caused
  disruptions to crop harvesting.

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Great Sparrow Campaign

• While the Great Sparrow Campaign initially
  appeared to produce an increase in grain output,
  the countryside became infested with locusts, a
  much more serious pest than sparrows.
• Mao called the plan off, but it was too late.
• Swarming locusts coupled with bad weather and the
  misguided Great Leap Forward led to the Great
  Chinese Famine (?????, San Nián Dà Jihuang),
  which killed 30 million people between 1958 and
  1961.

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• Propaganda Poster to encourage rural children to
  hunt and kill the sparrows

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• Picture of rural family looking at all the
  sparrows they have killed.

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• Propaganda Poster to encourage peasants to hunt
  and kill the sparrows.