Leap Forward and 100 Flowers

¶ … Leap Forward and 100 Flowers Campaign

The Hundred Flowers Campaign began out of Zhou Enlai's theory that the government could be made to work better if the citizenry was allowed to lend insight into the policies and problems in the government, initially minor local bureaucracies. Mao adopted the idea and, equating it with the Warring States period, he used it as a tool to promote socialism. He believed that the dialogue that would flow from the campaign would show socialism to be the most superior ideology.

However, the campaign did not have that effect. Criticism came in a flood, some of it promoting ideas consider very radical by the Communist establishment. The government quickly lost control of the Campaign as some of the dialogue became very public and brash. Both the amount of criticism and its radical nature came to be viewed as a threat to the establishment. The result was a short burst of public criticism followed by a repressive crackdown. The Hundred Flowers Campaign was soon being used to identify critics and subsequently silence them.

Mao went along with the Anti-Rightist campaign for a couple of reasons. The first was that he had felt so threatened by the criticism of the Hundred Flowers Campaign that he felt he needed to re-establish some measure of control over the ideologies that were presented to the public. Further to this, Mao was an ideologue. He believed firmly in socialism, and that the Hundred Flowers Campaign would propel the spread of socialist ideology to quarters of society that had previously resisted it. Instead, he saw strong support for capitalism. His support of the Anti-Rightist Movement was in part a reaction to this perceived insult.

The Great Leap Forward was caused in part by Mao's vision that China needed to carve its own path in Communism. He wanted China to move from a largely agrarian society to a more modern, industrialized one.

Mao decided that the best way to accomplish this was via full-scale collectivization of agriculture and by dramatically increasing steel production. These plans were based on his belief that success could be achieved by mobilizing China's massive peasant workforce. Agriculture was collectivized, and some new techniques were introduced in an attempt to boost output. Mao's concept for increased steel production involved hundreds of thousands of backyard steel furnaces.