ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates the roles of the key actors interacting with Mao Zedong under the transformed Great Leap policy process the Chairman's leadership colleagues, members of his personal staff, the central Party apparatus. The dominance of the Party was thoroughly reflected in the basic leap forward ideological principle of political leadership of the bureaucracy. The escalation of steel targets was one of the most dramatic cases, and one illuminating the transformed economic policymaking process under the leap forward. The Nanning conference set in motion a process of utopian dreaming and ever-escalating economic targets which reached a fever pitch by November 1958 when Mao Zedong began a 'cooling down' process at the first Zhengzhou conference. Chen Yun was not only the architect of the Soviet-style First Five-Year Plan (FFYP), but the main economic thinker behind both the opposition to rash advance and the effort to modify the Soviet model in 1956.
