ABSTRACT
Whoever says Great Leap Forward today says famine. It is surprising, then, that this catastrophe in which somewhere between 10 million (the current Chinese estimation) and 43 million people died has been so little studied. This enormous range of estimates – others have suggested as few as 4 or as many as 60 million – suggests something of the reliability of the knowledge about the Leap. But such is the powerful appeal of a massive number of deaths that the upper numbers have not only “won” hands down, but are repeated ad nauseum in academe and popular discourse. Thus speaks as well the power of the emperor’s appeal – it is all narrated as if Mao’s psychology and total personal responsibility is the sole issue, not the event of the Leap itself or the multiple causes of its economic collapse. Before moving on then, we need to briefly recover the purpose or vision of the Leap as well as broach an alternative explanation for its failure. The Leap was first and foremost an economic program and rural developmental strategy and vision. It was not intended to harm people, nor even to forcibly collectivize agriculture in the manner of Stalinist Russia in the 1930s. The whole point of Mao’s Critique of Soviet Economics was that Stalin did do so in a reactionary fashion and without peoples’ participation. Economically, it attempted an alternative to the market (material incentives and commodified labor) and the large, top-down and nationwide planning apparatuses of the Soviet Union. So, too, the Maoist line pushed for self-reliant economies in provinces and regions. This was a security concern, given the U.S. presence in Taiwan and East Asia, and a reflection of the Maoist ethic of local autonomy. As the historian Jack Gray has argued, “in economic terms the Leap was not irrational” but rather the Chinese form of then-current planning theories, and of reactions against capitalist-developmentalism and centralized, Stalinist versions of rural collectivization (307). More specifically, the Leap was not only a bigger-is-better movement into larger communes, but a three-pronged campaign: “labor-intensive farmland construction” to prevent flood and draughts; “local [rural] industrial development” organized through the communes; and the development of “the modern sector [infrastructure] at the provincial level” so that each province would have “at the disposal of local development a backbone of basic industries with whose assistance counties could in turn create their own industrial minicomplexes to support
industries lower down” (Gray 307). What this amounts to, in short, is a relative privileging of rural industry and peoples instead of the pursuit of heavy industry in the urban centers; an emphasis on the interior, most backward provinces and areas; an “awareness that increased agricultural production and peasant incomes” were crucial to growth; a passion for “rural community development”; and the belief that “popular participation in development was socially and economically necessary” (Gray 307-8). What this implies is both an economic theory and an ethical-political vision that actually privileges or centers on rural China and peasants.1 Prosaically but importantly, it means seeing “surplus rural labor” (massive numbers of poor and under-or unemployed) not as a curse, but as a great resource to be used to develop the countryside industrially and in other ways. In the context of the time – or within standard neo-liberalism today – this was decidedly innovative. The essential idea was to turn China’s greatest liability – a lack of capital and massive rural surplus labor – into an asset. As Patnaik notes, by “directly transforming under-employed surplus labour into capital at minimal extra cost, a firm basis was laid for agricultural productive transformation which fed into industrial growth, as well as for the gains in human development indicators.”2 The conversion of surplus labor into capital amounted to the employment of rural people in sideline industries; the resources gained were ploughed back into production in the same communities. The Leap marks a paradoxical but foundational aspect of Maoist governance and discourse: it was actually an effort to decentralize or work against bureaucracy, and to insist on local participation and initiative in implementing and carrying out policy and developing that modern sector. This is the point to the emphasis on the provinces, counties, and villages participating directly, as noted above by Gray. As Riskin has further explained, Mao’s plans for sub-national development were not only a solution to the problems of centralized planning and a (lacking, weak) national domestic market, but also an explicitly antibureaucratic program (China’s Political Economy 206-7). In keeping with the Maoist mandate to make Marxism fit specific, national conditions, the emphasis on the provincial and local sought to eliminate “China’s long bureaucratic tradition, which had not vanished” (Riskin, China’s Political Economy 207). Not just the critique, but also the active attempt to curtail and reform bureaucracy in favor of the local is a legacy of Maoist discourse and governance. Equally important to note here in the vision of the Leap are its more profound socio-cultural and political dimensions. Take, for example, the use of crèches or nurseries (what Americans would call daycare today) as well as the creation of communal dining halls not as state-domination of individual freedom but as state feminism: attempts to relieve women of the double-burden of domestic labor. It was a rational and political response to the fact that “merely” empowering women to work in the fields and factories was not enough to liberate them. So, too, it is worth emphasizing the spatial analysis built into the Leap as strategy: after centuries of urban and coastal dominance the interior and hinterland were to get their due and to be integrated into the economy and now “nation,” freeing them of dependence on the former. Overcoming the rural/urban divide in China
was at the heart of ending poverty, want, and inequality, and it remains so today. The Dengist solution appears to be one of using the market to magically pull people away from the rural areas and transform the countryside – or more accurately the cities – in tried and true capitalist fashion: on the backs of rural migrant labor, and with the abandonment of the countryside and rural/urban hierarchy. There is something enormously callous and irresponsible to that, whatever the faults of the Leap may have been. And it is painfully obvious to any observer of China that the cities and the rich coastal belt of the P.R.C. dominate China as never before in its long history. The pursuit of rural industrialization, it should also be noted, was furthermore an attempt to overcome the manual/ mental labor divide, whereby the farmers – the laborers of China – were always and forever to be relegated to the latter category. This is not, then, a desire to leave village China alone in its poverty and isolation, nor to make China one big city. The emphasis on overcoming the intellectual/manual labor is something deeply rooted in Marxism and the ethical critique of capitalism (as the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel made clear decades ago).3 It is also crucial for development, which is to say for the elimination of poverty, and the raising of living conditions and life chances for all. As every child knows, China overall has benefitted from the Dengist and later reforms and the deployment of capital. But poverty, severe inequality, regional disparities, urban and elite dominance, centralized bureaucracy, and so on are still enormous problems for China. From this standpoint, the Leap’s vision and economic theories may not seem as bizarre and aberrant as they once were in the heady days of the 1980s and early 1990s. So, too, there is the argument advanced by Han Dongping among others that while the rural economics of the Leap certainly failed, they returned in modified form during the later Cultural Revolution and up through the 1980s. The Leap model was behind the explosive rural growth of Township Village Enterprises during those later years (TVEs).4 The organizational methods and market-distribution mechanisms changed, but the collective form and the emphasis on rural industrialization and sidelines remained consistent. After decollectivization, TVEs and related infrastructure were already in place. As with the rest of the Chinese economy, the socialism that was in place could be used to build capitalism quite quickly. Despite the disastrous aspects of the Leap (the famine mortality), the basic rural, Maoist strategy eventually worked effectively in later decades until it was dismantled in the return to household agriculture, the profit motive, and the war of each against all.5 The above account of the rationality and vision of the Leap is obviously a truncated one, but is hopefully enough to recall that it was not mad or foolish but a part of Maoist discourse (and, as Gray noted, of broader trends in economic thinking).6 As is well known – and by Mao’s own frank admission and standards – the Leap was also a failure, even a catastrophic one. The controversy lies with its causes and moreover with its mortality figures. We will cover some of this ground below in an examination of the extent of the famine and the use of statistics. But first I want to recall what I take to be a persuasive and non-orientalist account of the failure of the Leap, which is to say of the reorganization and
development of the rural economy and market system that existed prior to the 1950s. I refer here to the work of G. William Skinner and his spatial and regional analyses of the traditional Chinese economy in terms of its distributional systems. Skinner’s work is intricately detailed and rigorously structuralist (full of grids, maps, and spatial metaphors), though does not address the Leap famine and economic collapse head-on. This may in a sense be its advantage because it allows us to see the 1958-61 experiment in a different type of context. What he offers is in effect an image of “China” and the Chinese rural economy or structure as a complex and deeply rooted system of market towns (at local, intermediate, and central levels all beneath the city/urban level), distributional and transport networks, regular and periodic markets, temple fairs, and so forth. All of it rooted in and dependent upon the fundamental level of the village; the people and economy at that level, as a whole, are what make the entire system work. But it is a complex system and not a mere matter of kinship bonds and the like, and this is also what makes it different than traditional, often ethnographic Sinological analyses of village economies. What emerges from his work is a rural economy – nearly all of China prior to the Leap years – that is a complexly layered, interwoven “articulated marketing structure.” This is a system presumably well beyond the immediate knowledge of previous governments and administrations over in Beijing or elsewhere, be they Communist or dynastic. But it is also the type of knowledge they would necessarily need in order to even gradually develop a modern economy – especially a planned one. What happens, then, is that this entire, traditional structure is in Skinner’s words “wantonly abandoned” almost overnight in 1958 (109). Skinner’s diction here may tip his hand as to his own economic philosophy, but this is perhaps beside the point. The speed of the Leap Forward into greater communes and new marketing/distributional systems was one condition of failure in itself – within the “bigger, better, faster” slogan and mentality of the Leap it is the emphasis on speed that was the most unfortunate. But the overall problem here, from the standpoint of Skinner’s work, is that the previous rural marketing system that had evolved over hundreds of years was disbanded too quickly and, moreover, without any effective and organized structure in its place. The movement of grain from places with a surplus to places with a deficit, for example, was affected by this.7 Market towns and the cycle of market days and so forth disappeared. Despite their undeniable production of inequality and of the power of money, markets are after all efficient in signaling not just price information but in effect coordinating distribution, helping make production decisions, relaying information across great distances, and so on. In retrospect, without something in place to substitute for and improve upon the traditional rural marketing structure, there were bound to be major problems. The point here, then, is not the abandoning of the “free” market mechanism per se, but of the speed of this otherwise just and rational decision, as well as the lack of a proper alternative system and structure of knowledge in place. Skinner’s analysis is not in my view Hayekian. This is in part a story about the difficult transition to a modern economy from a traditional one (as Skinner argues). But it also confirms what
Gray for one has argued: it is not that the economic theory of the Leap was unsound but that its implementation was very much so, and this in turn had to do with the complicated and tumultuous politics of the time.8 Within the latter are the well-known “facts” we already know: the Soviet split and pull-out from China, the looming war with the U.S. and invasion from Taiwan, the line struggles within the Party and the class conflicts within the newly liberated country, and so forth. All of this sped up the process. Gradualism was abandoned and the Leap ended up in a paradoxically Stalinist mode or form (“gigantism” and authoritarian implementation in some places) even as it attempted to carry out an anti-Stalinist economic revolution (Gray 310). We do not have the space to pursue this further here, and this is not to argue for one, single-shot cause of the Leap’s economic collapse. But Skinner’s work does cast light on the matter, and without delving into psychologizing, court politics, accounts of oriental despotism or cruelty, and various external, anachronistic factors (as in the work of Amartya Sen discussed below), the Leap and its failure becomes again a political-economic and intellectual problem from which to study and learn, as opposed to an exemplum about the evils and insanities of Mao, collective agriculture, communism, and so on.
