Chinese Economic Development

4 The Great Famine, 1955–1963China’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 altogethermore radical development strategy which centred on the suppression of materialincentives, public ownership of land and economic assets, the mass mobilizationof labour and an overwhelming emphasis on defence industrialization. That yearmarks the launch of this strategy, characterized as it was by the rapid establishmentof producer cooperatives in Chinese agriculture and the nationalization ofthe last remnants of private industry. It culminated in the Great Leap Forward of1958, and the disastrous famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s.Towards the Great Leap Forward: policy debates in the 1950sIn retrospect, and as we saw in the previous chapter, it is evident that early Maoismadhered to the Soviet approach of the 1920s. 1 In fact, early Maoism was littlemore than a sinified form of NEP. To be sure, the relations of production were notleft untouched; land reform is the most obvious example of a policy designed toraise output by means of institutional change. Nevertheless, the focus of Chinesepolicy during the early 1950s was on economic modernization and the transformationof the forces of production using Soviet technology and based on a high(but not extreme) rate of investment.Many within the Chinese leadership, notably Liu Shaoqi, advocated a continuationof this strategy during the late 1950s. Most of these officials were afraid thatan attempt at acceleration would fail because China simply lacked the capacityto mechanize its agriculture in the 1950s, something which was widely seen as anecessary condition for rapid agricultural development and the release of labourfor rural industrialization. In the absence of mechanization, agriculture wouldflounder and China would risk a repeat of the famine which afflicted the SovietUnion after 1929, when it too tried to accelerate agricultural growth in defianceof ‘objective’ conditions. Moreover, the performance of the Chinese economyappears to have been better in the 1950s than that of the Soviet Union in the 1920s.Maddison’s (2003: 182–4) estimates show that per capita GDP in 1957 was about7 per cent higher than it had been in 1936. That certainly suggested that there wasno need to abandon the early Maoist development strategy. 2