ABSTRACT
The springboard for what would be called the Great Leap Forward was the second session of the Eighth Party Congress, which met in May 1958. Peng's attack on Mao could have been arranged in advance with Khrushchev as a move to reduce Mao's influence and to repair Sino-Soviet relations. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) stood to lose a great deal if Mao's ideological differences with Moscow jeopardized overall relations with the Soviet Union, as cuts in Soviet aid had already placed the military's modernization program in jeopardy. If the Soviet slide into capitalism was bad, and in fact already an accomplished fact, what disturbed Mao even more was that he saw the same thing happening in China under Liu Shaoqi. The Socialist Education Movement lasted from 1962 to 1965 and included a number of rectification campaigns of criticism and self-criticism on the model that dated from Yan'n days.
