ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the concepts of the People's Commune and the Great Leap Forward. At the beginning of the Second Five-Year Plan, China still counted on support by the USSR, which was committed to deliver not only farm machinery but plant equipment that would allow China to build her own farm machinery, especially tractors. With this equipment, the rural collectives would quickly manage the transition to mechanized agriculture with its concomitant large increases in output and surpluses. The new "Commune" became an essential ingredient of the almost simultaneously inaugurated Great Leap Forward. When the repercussions of the Great Leap Forward reached industry and caused widespread cutbacks in production and in some cases complete stoppage of plants and projects, the government lost little time in redeploying immobilized manpower. At first, unemployed urban workers were sent to the surrounding countryside in emergency operations to help out where agricultural collectives were in need of more labour.
