ABSTRACT
I think the Great Leap Forward campaign should be conceived not just as a leftist error, which is the way it was criticised in 1959 and then again in 1960 and 1961, and how it is still described. The leftist error is often officially specified as the blowing of a Communist wind: the promise of abundance, to be realised soon. There is much to support this description. The Great Leap was by political will and organisation to catch up with the UK in steel and grain production within three years, meanwhile eating your fill according to need in communal dining halls. But in addition I think it is useful to think of it in a longer historical perspective as an instance of state-organised self-strengthening. From mass callisthenics, organised in schools, workplaces and barracks, to the Party’s mass line through which the Party leads by encouraging and taking up the most advanced examples of mass organisation for food production and for military industrial strength, the Great Leap Forward was a Communist elaboration of the movement for a strengthening of the national essence (guo cui) that had started in the last decades of the nineteenth century. What was unique, rather than continuous with previous versions of Chinese self-strengthening, was the singular organisation of all life into the great Me of the political and domestic body. The nature of the leadership of this single body produced what I shall call aggravated indifference to the subjects of leadership.
