ABSTRACT
China’s strategy of gradual transition to socialism was abandoned in 1955. Instead, an attempt was made to accelerate the growth rate by the adoption of an altogether more radical development strategy which centred on the suppression of material incentives, public ownership of land and economic assets, the mass mobilization of labour and an overwhelming emphasis on defence industrialization. That year marks the launch of this strategy, characterized as it was by the rapid establishment of producer cooperatives in Chinese agriculture and the nationalization of the last remnants of private industry. It culminated in the Great Leap Forward of 1958, and the disastrous famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
