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The Success Of The Great Leap

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In addition to hastiness, many projects failed because people lacked the skills necessary to perform them. The Great Leap did not support educated people and therefore the projects were often run by uneducated cadres, commune managers, and often failed (310) (72). People did not know how to do the jobs that the government forced them to do (31) (311). They plowed so deeply that the soiled had salt in it (311). The peasants were ordered to look for uranium and petroleum in the countryside, not knowing the appearance of these resources nor the proper way to find and collect them (31). People forced to make steel in their backyards often did not know how it was done so that what they made was often unusable (31). Because so much of the produce was worthless, the country found that they had pledged more exports than they had (80). A policy in 1958 was "Larger imports, larger exports" (78) but in 1958 they owed large amounts of money to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany (80) and in 1959 they were still having complaints from foreign countries about not delivering the promised exports (81). To meet necessary exports, Mao decided that the country should cut down on meat and oil consumption and export most of it (82). Because the government failed to properly plan the Great Leap, they did not consider that there were skills necessary in performing various projects and that their people did not have these skills, causing their projects to fail and their country to lose the

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