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Returning from Moscow immediately following the launch of Sputnik 1, and not wishing to be outdone by the Soviet Union, Mao declared that China would catch up with – and ultimately overtake – the economic production of Britain within fifteen years. He called it the ‘Great Leap Forward’. His attempt to do so ended with arguably the greatest catastrophe the country has ever known and caused the death – predominantly from hunger – of tens of millions of people.112
Ignoring the terrible hardships of Stalin’s five-year plans of the early 1930s, which had themselves resulted in the death of several million Russians and Ukrainians, Mao instigated a programme of planned and rapid industrialisation and collectivisation. In an attempt to meet unachievable targets, the entire population was mobilised to set up backyard furnaces; pots, pans and farming implements were just some of the metal objects sacrificed in the drive for steel, which was always of questionable quality. To run the furnaces, forests were cut down and houses destroyed. Millions were pushed into communes of collectivised farm holdings and millions of others were mobilised to take part in massive, and generally unsuccessful, countrywide irrigation projects.
The end result was a shortage of agricultural workers to tend the crops and a lack of implements with which to gather them. With targets continuously revised upwards, they became less and less impossible to attain. This led to rice husks being filled with water to increase their weight and left to rot due to an infrastructure woefully inadequate to collect the crops. Worse still, in order to buy foreign machinery and in order to prove that China was close to achieving communist paradise, the little grain that was collected was often exported in large quantities in an attempt to hide the massive shortfall. Significant quantities of grain were also donated free of charge to communist regimes globally.
Mismanagement on a titanic scale led to a severe shortage of grain, which resulted in mass starvation throughout the country. The livestock that was not exported often starved to death with the people. Cotton did not escape the export quotas and much of the population lived in rags as a result. Despite the obvious problems, the Chinese Communists adopted the Stalinist tactic of imprisoning and/or killing anyone who dared to criticise ‘The Great Leap Forward’, blaming all problems on counter-revolutionaries. In a disregard for human life on a par with Stalin or Hitler, Mao responded to the problems by stating, ‘When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.’
As if the population had not suffered enough, in an attempt to reassert his authority, in 1966 Mao launched The Cultural Revolution. Bands of young revolutionaries were encouraged to roam through the country and destroy the ‘Four Olds’: old customs, old habits, old culture and old thinking. Older authority figures were verbally and physically attacked and the Communist Party was purged. Millions of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were subsequently sent to labour camps in the countryside.
Political and ideological relations between China and the Soviet Union had been worsening before the Cultural Revolution, as Beijing began to supplant Moscow as the ideological leader of the world communist movement and continued to worsen. Mao, who had supported Stalin ideologically and politically despite Stalin’s treatment of him as the inferior younger brother, became concerned both with Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation and with his advocacy of peaceful co-existence between communist and capitalist nations. This was seen by Mao as a betrayal of Marxism and a clear retreat from the struggle to achieve global communism. In 1960 the Soviet side withdrew its aid to China in what came to be known as the Sino-Soviet split, and in 1969 the two countries even saw military conflict on their borders. Sino-Soviet relations only warmed again in the 1980’s, after the death of Mao.