The Great Leap Forward
This article is part of the Basic Liberalism Course -> Module 7: Distortions of the Free Market
Last updated: 2026-06-07
NOTE: To understand the concepts mentioned in this article, it is advisable to have read the articles from Module 6: Free Market Economy
The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Great Chinese Famine constitute one of the most tragic and revealing episodes in the history of the 20th century. It was not an “error” or a natural tragedy, but the logical and predictable consequence of attempting to impose radical central planning on a complex economy, especially in the agricultural sector.
Context and launch of the Great Leap
After the communist victory of 1949 and the consolidation of power (including the anti-revolutionary campaign and the “Hundred Flowers” followed by the repression of the “rightists”), Mao Zedong sought to accelerate the transition to communism and surpass the Soviet model.
The Great Leap Forward was the Second Campaign of the Five-Year Plan (1958-1962). Its declared objective: to achieve in a few years what took other countries decades —rapidly industrialize and increase agricultural production— through the massive mobilization of labor and ideological enthusiasm, without the need for large capital investments or advanced technology.
Mao believed that the “will of the people” and collective organization could overcome material limitations. This vision reflected what Hayek called constructivist rationalism: the pretension that a central authority can design and direct a complex social and economic order from above.
The central policies of the Great Leap
The people's communes
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Existing agricultural cooperatives were merged into gigantic units (sometimes of tens of thousands of people).
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Private plots, individual utensils, and family kitchens were abolished.
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Communal dining halls, nurseries, and “homes of happiness” for the elderly were established.
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The objective was to free female labor and maximize collective work.
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In practice, it destroyed individual incentives and the local knowledge of peasants about their lands.
Backyard steel furnaces
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Millions of small furnaces were built in courtyards, villages, and fields.
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Peasants, students, and workers had to smelt iron and steel to “catch up with and surpass Great Britain in 15 years”.
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Agricultural tools, pots, doors, and even coffins were melted to feed the furnaces.
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The result: steel of poor quality (useless pig iron) that accumulated in railway yards, while essential tools for agriculture were destroyed and entire forests were cut down for fuel.
The “agricultural innovations”
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Influenced by pseudoscientific ideas (such as those of Trofim Lysenko in the USSR), dense planting (plants “help each other”), deep plowing, and the elimination of the “Four Pests” (sparrows, rats, flies, and mosquitoes) were promoted.
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The mass killing of sparrows caused explosions of insect pests.
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These measures completely ignored plant biology and local ecosystems: competition for light and nutrients reduces yield, and altering food chains has unpredictable consequences.
The system of requisitions and inflated reports
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Local cadres (the army) competed to demonstrate loyalty by reporting fantastic harvests.
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The central government set grain delivery quotas based on those unrealistic figures.
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China continued to export grain to the Soviet Union to pay for industrial machinery, while real production plummeted.
The Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961/62)
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The combination of these factors caused the collapse of agricultural production.
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Grain harvests fell drastically.
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The State continued to extract food according to the false figures. The result was the deadliest famine in recorded history.
Estimated deaths:
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Between 15 and 55 million people, with the most currently accepted estimates ranging from 30 to 45-46 million deaths from starvation and related diseases between 1959 and 1961 (some studies include 1958 and 1962).
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Represented about 7% of China's population at the time.
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The most affected provinces were Anhui (up to 18% of the population dead), Chongqing, Sichuan, Guizhou, and Hunan.
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There were documented cases of cannibalism, desperate migrations repressed by the army, and parents who, in extreme desperation, came to eat their children.
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The Chinese government initially denied the famine or attributed it to bad weather and “saboteurs”.
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Mao partly blamed local cadres and the “rightists”, although central policies were the main cause.
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Only from 1960-1961, with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping assuming greater practical control, was some relaxation allowed (limited private plots, end of mandatory dining halls), which helped the recovery.
Analysis from the Austrian School
Economic calculation problem (Mises):
- Without market prices generated by private property and voluntary exchange, it was impossible to know how much “real” steel was needed, how much grain could be sustainably produced, or how to allocate labor between agriculture and industry. Planners in Beijing were operating blindly.
Knowledge problem (Hayek):
- The knowledge of how to better cultivate a specific plot, which varieties resist the local climate, or how to organize family work is dispersed among millions of peasants. Central planning suppressed it and replaced it with ideological orders.
Incentives and human action:
- The abolition of private property and family kitchens eliminated individual responsibility. Peasants worked less efficiently on communal lands (“the State's land is no one's”). Cadres falsified figures out of fear of being accused of rightists.
Biological and ecological dimension:
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Agriculture is an interaction between human action and complex biological systems (soils, plants, insects, seasonal cycles).
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The Great Leap policies treated nature as a malleable blank slate by political will, ignoring plant biology (intraspecific competition), population ecology (sparrows and pests), and the reality that successful agricultural knowledge is local and evolutionary, not decreed from the center.
Legacy
The Great Leap was a disaster of such magnitude that it forced a temporary retreat. However, Mao did not accept the ideological defeat and launched the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to regain control and purge the “pragmatists” like Liu and Deng.
Only after Mao's death (1976) and the rise of Deng Xiaoping were market reforms initiated that transformed China.
This episode dramatically illustrates the Austrian warning: when the spontaneous order of the market is suppressed and an attempt is made to replace it with central design, the result is not the promised abundance, but scarcity, mass suffering, and, in the most extreme cases, famines on an industrial scale.
This article is part of the Basic Liberalism Course -> Module 7: Distortions of the Free Market
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Last updated: 2026-06-07
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