Unit 2

• Mao's agricultural aims

  • Increase food supplies to feed workers in new factories
  • Wanted to enhance the popularity of the Communists
• Attacks on landlordism

  • Landowners were viewed as feudal class enemies
  • Work teams of Party cadres sent to villages to encourage peasants to drag landlords before 'struggle meetings' where they'd be denounced (some were sentenced to death)
• Agrarian Reform Law

  • 1950
  • Stated a system of peasant land ownership shall be introduced
  • Removed legal protection from landlords and left them powerless
  • Violence sometimes escalated beyond work teams. Peasants settling family feuds or using it as a chance to seize more land from neighbors
  • 1952 - 43% of land redistributed to 60% of the population
  • 1 to 2 million landlords executed
  • 1950-52 agricultural production increased 15% per year
• Mutual Aid Teams (MATs)

  • 1951
  • Organised peasants into work teams of 10 households
  • Shared reources such as tools, animals and fertilisers
• Agricultural Producers' Co-operatives (APCs)

  • 30 to 50 households
  • Land remained in private ownership
  • Sate took a share of the harvest and peasants received money or grain back in payment
  • However, may of the richer peasants didn;t want to join so slaughtered their animals rather than give them to the APC
  • 1953-54 grain production increased less than 2%
• Collectivisation

  • 1955 - Mao demanded an increase in the pace of production and end to all private ownership
  • 1956 - 80% of all peasant households in APCs
  • All equipment shared
• Communes

  • 1958
  • Mao believed they would increase agricultural and industrial production 'Walking on Two Legs'
  • Avg size - 5,500 households
  • First commune was the 'Sputnik Commune' (in honour of USSR's first satellite state) in 1958 in the Henan Province
  • Half a billion people had been moved, 99% of the population
• Communal Living Vision

  • Mess halls provided food
  • Creches and schools would provide childcare and education (women freed from burden of childcare)
  • 'Happiness Homes' for grandparents as they were spared from childcare burden
• Communal Living Reality

  • Creches poorly organised with under qualified staff
  • Parents forced to work long hours
  • Mess halls destroyed family traditions
  • Food was of poor quality and diets worsened
  • Women expected to undertake harsh physical labour even whilst pregnant which often led to miscarriages
• Four Pests Campaign

  • 1958-62
  • Peasants compelled to exterminate sparrows, flies mosquitoes and rats as Mao believed production wasn't increasing as they were eating all the grain
  • Peasants banged pots to scare the sparrows till they fell from exhaustion (they didn't tend to the crops)
  • The sparrows ate the insects meaning a plague of locusts ate the grain
• Lysenkoism

  • He was a agrobiologist whose ideas had been supported by Stalin in the 1930s
  • Lysenko claimed that crop yields would increase if seeds were exposed to moisture and planted deeply and close together
  • However, this caused the crop yields to decrease and unleashed the famine of 1958-62
• Great Famine Causes

  • Party cadres in the communes inflated their reports of what was produced as they didn't what to be seen as failures
  • In turn, the bosses in the Party set higher production quotas
  • The Party believed that there would be too much to store so surplus was sent abroad to fellow Communists countries as gifts
• Life during Great Famine

  • 8 million starved to death in the Anhui province
  • 1 million died in Tibet
  • Starving peasants launched desperate attacks on food stores - those found stealing were sentenced to death
  • People ate frogs, worms and tree bark
  • Outbreaks of cannibalism and men sold their wives for prostitution in exchange for food
  • 30-50 million died
• The Great Famine - Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping

  • Replaced 'Walking on Two Legs' with 'Agriculture as the foundation of the economy'
  • Communes reduced in size and peasants allowed to farm small,private plots
  • Food could be traded at markets
  • The Party sent emergency fertilisers , insecticides and tools
  • 1965 - agricultural production recovered returning 1957 level
• First Five-Year Plan 1952-56

  • Close to Stalin's model in the USSR as they were a major ally to China
  • Soviet support was extensive - loan of $300 million over 5 years
  • Construction of 7 iron and steel plants, 63 machinery plants and 25 electric power stations
  • Sent 1100 Soviet industrial experts to China
• Successes of 1FYP

  • Annual growth rate over 9% (most targets reached or surpassed)
  • Engineering works - bridge constructed across the Yangtze river as propaganda
  • Living standards and job security guaranteed
  • Population doubled to over 100 million
• Failures of 1FYP

  • Many factories sacrificed quality for quantity
  • Officials exaggerated levels of output
  • Most workers had low levels of literacy and basic skills - held back economic growth
  • Administrators lacked organisational and managerial experience which led to a lack of co-operation
• GLF - state owned enterprises

  • Industrial firms taken over
  • Party dictated prices businesses could charge and production targets they had to meet
  • Wages were set by the Party
  • Workers given a home, healthcare and an education
  • Enterprises were inefficient as no matter the effort a worker put in he was paid the same - no incentive
• Successes of GLF

  • Propaganda success - Tinanmen Square remodeled and new modern buildings erected
  • Ideological success - society resembled communism more closely than before
  • Smaller scale irrigation projects, increase in production of some raw materials
• Failures of GLF

  • Targets unrealistic
  • Millions worked till death or died from starvation
  • Projects poorly planned - Three Gate Gorge over the Yellow River caused environmental damage that made farming more difficult
  • Backyard furnaces
• Backyard furnaces

  • Built to increase steel production
  • Peasants melted cooking implements such as woks and burnt wood for fuel from chairs, tables, doors and roofs
  • The steel produced was of poor quality and useless
  • Crops rotted whilst peasants attended to the furnaces
• Lushan Conference

  • 1959
  • Party held a conference - Peng Duhai (Minister of Defence) voiced doubts about the reports recording 375 million tons of grain
  • Peng traveled to his home village in Hunan and witnessed the plight of peasantry
  • He wrote a private letter to Mao about the issue of exaggerated reporting
  • Mao felt betrayed and made the letter public and accused him of colliding with Khrushchev
  • Peng was replaced by Lin Biao
• Economic reform of Liu and Deng

  • Pragmatists
  • Industries and factories told to make profit
  • 1965 - industrial output nearly doubled 1957 level
  • End of 1962 - availability of tools, boats and carts had be restored to the same level as before the communes
  • Opportunity to work in private plots increased incentive
  • Communes reduced in size and peasants were given greater freedom