How accurate is it to say that Mao Zedong’s agricultural policies from 1949 were the most important reason for the famine of 1959–62?

Farmers had to grow crops but also had to work to produce steel and iron in addition to infrastructure projects. This policy led to deaths of millions of Chinese peasants and what came to be known as the biggest famine in history. This was a huge failure for Mao, and threw off his position as leader.

Mao had lost power after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to modernize China’s economy by developing agriculture and industry which led to the deaths of nearly 13,000 people due to famine. Mao eventually stood down as Chairman of the People Republic

This document shows how living conditions and independence did not improve for landowners. Landowners only lost their land and homes. It wasn’t fair how low classes were able to make more money when landowners couldn’t have better living conditions. Document 9 by an unknown person who was an economist made a line graph for people interested in China’s GDP to see how China’s GDP was at that time. This line graph shows how the quality of people’s life wasn’t improving because there wasn’t any jobs for them. The economy was very weak since there wasn’t enough jobs. Factories didn’t improve either they stayed the same because of the value of the materials. People couldn’t afford things because since there wasn’t jobs they didn’t have enough money to be able to buy things. The Communist China notes talks about the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward began from 1958 and ended in 1960. During 1959 through 1961 about 50 million people died of starvation. Mao forced people to work and it

In 1949 Mao Zedong and his communist revolutionaries had won control of China after a civil war that had lasted more than 20 years. Mao’s revolution was based on a society where the workers control the government. During this time China was a substandard country due to the years of war, disease, and natural disaster. To help make china stronger Mao called for couples to have more babies because babies equal more workers and more work leads to a stronger China. To help economically, people were forced to abandon farming and help aid an industrial China, thus known as The Great Leap Forward. With the replacing of farms, China was reconciled to food shortages, which then led to the killing of an estimated 30 million people. Therefore mao turned

Mao Zedong, the leader of China during the third quarter of the 20th century, organized two movements in his country in an attempt to develop China 's economy through the establishment of communism. Through The Great Leap Forward, Mao planned to change the layout of the Chinese economy by forcing collectivism on his country and implementing other ways to speed up production. Since this movement failed, he then implemented The Cultural Revolution. It consisted of the same goals but was carried out through violence and was also an utter failure. These two movements failed because of the lack of organization with which they were performed. This lack of organization manifested itself in a number of different ways. The government did not care about their people, the reforms themselves were not planned out in detail, the government did not think about the spontaneity of young people, they did not consider the effect violence would have on their country, they did not realize the decline in education that would result from the participation of students in the revolution, they did not plan well economically, they did not examine the negative effects of communes, and they did not foresee the large number of deaths that would plague their country. Although designed to rapidly increase China 's economic growth through communism, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had the opposite effects and significantly diminished China 's economy. The two direct causes of the failure

In 1958, soon after the Anti-Rightist Movement, Mao Zedong announced "The Great Leap Forward" movement in attempt to increase agricultural and industrial production and modernize China's economy. The author of the book doesn't talk much

In 1949 china was under the expression of a communist state. The regime of china was set up in similarity to the regime of Vladimir Lenin in the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong was part of the communist party. He followed the vision of Karl Marx, by envisioning a society under his regime that all shared equal prosperity and communism. In order to bring this vision to reality, he wanted to eliminate all capitalism and its emphasis on property rights, profits, and free-market competition. In the 1950’s in the rural of china, Mao banned free markets, which involved peasants selling farm products. However the trade of capitalism still existed through the private enterprise of remnants. Mao was dissatisfied with the outcomes towards an economy of Marxism. So he strived for a stronger approach by coming up with the Great Leap Forward. However, after the intense economic development that china had suffered from the great leap forward, it left millions of individuals throughout china suffering from the masses and deaths from the collapse of the food system. Because of the major consequences that were suffered from this approach it was unable to be left unnoticed. So, in 1960 after Moa Zedong declined all responsibility towards the disaster from the Great Leap Forward, Lui Shao-chi and Deng Xiaoping were left to rectify and administer the crisis. However, their attempt to repair the economic damages towards china, only led to the reverse of Mao’s earlier policies. That were

The begins of Mao’s Cultural Revolution begins with the Hundred Flowers Campaign which took place during 1956-1957, the government embarks on this campaign with the hope that the tension between government and scholars can end, but this approach does not work and backfires. The next event which takes place in the Anti-Rights Campaign (1957-1958), this campaign disciplines those who spoke out during the Hundred flowers Campaign, a significant amount of people lots many jobs due to this and are sent away by government. This leads into the Great Leap Forward (1958-1959), this just happens to be one of Mao’s more intense programs of economic reform, in this program Mao’s main attempt was to modernize China’s economy, the consequence of this resulted in Mao’s having a temporary loss of power. He believed that all he needed to develop was agriculture and industry and believed that both

Around the time Ma Yin Chu began to publish articles on population, the Communist rule took over in China. The Communist were ruled by Mao Zedong. Mao directed most of his energy into the Chinese economy. In 1958, Mao created an economic plan called the great leap forward. This plan called for the people to use their will power to improve the economy. The lack of technology and capital made the plan back fire and lead the people into the great famine.

On October 1st 1949, Mao Zedong proclaims the foundation of the People Republic of China on Great of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) in Beijing (Source from: Lecture notes). In January 1958, Mao started a variety of economic, agricultural and cultural reforms. One of the many reforms started by Mao Zedong launched "The Great Leap forward". This began in 1958 to help change China. Mao proposed the land reform and suggested to develop city. The reform makes women, industry workers and peasant became winners. However, Peasant also got land and change to owner. As far as women’s literacy is concerned. There are not women in class when Mao did not launch reforms. After that, women can go to school have a class. The plan was to originally keep China communist, and increase production of agriculture. Mao Zedong put much emphasis on economic growth, which was very important to China.

It is clear that Mao’s initial goal was to gain power in China, which is demonstrated by his determination to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) via his idiosyncratic version of communist revolution. In order to do so, Mao utilised methods he deemed most suitable for the communists and, more broadly, Chinese society. For example, unlike his Marxist predecessors, Mao believed that peasants, not urban workers, were the key to rebellion in China. Subsequently, in 1926, he organised peasant unions

This constituted China's Great Leap Forward, an attempt by Mao and the State to unify the nation under a common goal in order to overthrow Great Britain and other European giants in agricultural production. Entire communities toiled vigorously in order to drastically increase China's production output and demonstrate the nation's growing prowess against the powers of the West. The Great Leap Forward, despite its disastrous failure which cost over 2 million lives, was a clear denouncement of individual freedom, instead raising the status of communities and 'awarding' collective freedom.

The Great Leap Forward was a creative yet disastrous interruption in Chinese economic development. It is one of those "moments" in Chinese history that is the epitome of Mao Zedong's willingness to experiment, as well as his political genius in seizing control of the forms of government out of the hands of his intellectual and political adversaries within the Communist Party of China. Given that more conservative leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, were not in agreement with Mao on the policies of the Great Leap Forward. The implementation of these policies resulted in disaster, generating a crisis in Chinese society as well as a massive famine that would in the end be resolved in ways unfavorable to Mao's political, economic,

In accordance to this, China went on a construction binge. Whole factories were purchased from abroad while others were built with local resources. By 1978, the frenzy for new projects reached a level that reminded some people of the Great Leap Forward. In an effort to promote agricultural production, the government released many of the restrictions on the 'spontaneous capitalist tendencies' of the peasantry. (173) In the late 1980's, the government decided to expand the scope of private marketing. The next step was to increase the amount land assigned to the peasants. The peasants were now not responsible to the government for the use they made to the private plots. They simply could grow what they wished, for the sale to the government or to private markets. This led to furious rebuilding and inflow of foreign investments. All this enabled China to remake itself into Asian's hub of finance, trade and culture.

Mao built communes throughout areas of china which contained on average five-thousand families. These turned out to be well controlled communities where the residents gave up all ownership of possessions, land, etc. The elderly and young children were looked after so healthy family members could work and not have to worry about them. Mao in May of 1958 launched another plan: the Great Leap Forward. This was Mao's economic plan to transform China into an industrial nation in two years. The plan was to decentralize agriculture and create communes which would promote heavy industry and agricultural production. The Great Leap Forward seemed to symbolize Mao's embrace of technology and industry. In 1958 700 million people had been placed in to 26, 785 communes. Small villages would set rice quotas and economic priorities and work as a group, sharing resources for the harvest. Communes can be seen as based on the Confucian idea of obligation. Traditionally, Confucianism obligated a child to respect a parent. Communes, according to Mao would replace that obligation to parents, with an obligation to Communism. The government worked tirelessly to keep workers motivated by vast propaganda tools. Devices such as, political speeches played in the fields, or goal setting was common. Also back-yard steel smelting furnaces were used which unfortunately produced poor qualities of steel, and over-consumed coal which led to a massive shortage.