ABSTRACT
Mao Tse-tung used his inspection tours and his studies of regional reports to look for alternative models of China's growing industry and agriculture to those in the Central Committee's directives. The Great Leap Forward policy was conceived by the Central Committee in the autumn of 1957 as 'a new high tide' of production using the slogan 'Overtake Britain in Fifteen Years'. During the Great Leap Forward, 500 new factories were commissioned. The urban communes were abandoned as premature. The scale of the changes in the hinterland was described by Rewi Alley, who reported the movement from several score communes during the Great Leap Forward. Mao celebrated the Great Leap Forward and the commune movement as a nation-wide upsurge of creative energy. Since the Great Leap Forward, Mao had shown great concern that the generation born since liberation should become successors to the Yenan tradition and join in struggle to educate themselves in the realities of people's power.
