9781422277676

involved a big assumption: that China could increase its agricul- tural output using a lot less labor and a lot less land. Under some circumstances, that wouldn’t be a completely unreasonable assump- tion. For example, an investment in tractors, threshers, and other mechanized farm equipment would enable fewer people to do more agricultural work. An investment in modern fertilizers could greatly increase crop yields per acre. But China didn’t make these kinds of investments. Still, Party leaders were confident. Other fac- tors, they believed, would lead to increased grain production. First, there was the revolutionary spirit of the Chinese people. Mao and other Party leaders thought that

This 1957 poster was designed to rally support for China’s industrial policy. It includes images of a manufacturing plant, a map of industrial facilities, and charts showing economic growth. Mao’s Great Leap Forward was an ambitious plan for China to catch up economically with industrialized nations like Great Britain and the United States.

enthusiasm for communism would spur peasants to higher and higher levels of productivity. Second, China’s leaders were counting on new agricultural techniques championed by the Party’s “experts.” These techniques were supposedly scientific. But they’d never actually been tested. In both cases, the confidence of China’s leaders turned out to be misplaced. Many peasants weren’t at all happy about col-

Nightmare in China

13