ABSTRACT
The period in which the farmers of Houhua Village had the least freedom, the least control over their lives, was at the end of the 1950s during a campaign known as the “Great Leap Forward.” The name is ironic, for ultimately the campaign proved to be a great leap backward. It began in 1958 with the confident prediction that China would leap beyond Great Britain in industrial production in fifteen years (a feat requiring an eightfold increase in output) and leap beyond the Soviet Union in the transition from socialism to communism at the same time. It ended three years later with a 14 percent decline in industrial production and an agricultural disaster in the countryside that demographers estimate cost thirty million lives throughout China.
