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Soon after taking power in 1949, China’s Communist gov- ernment started a program of rural land reform. The process involved several steps and took years to complete. By 1956, how- ever, private ownership of land had been eliminated. Individual farms had been merged into “agri- cultural producers’ cooperatives.” Each cooperative consisted of about 30 to 50 households. Many peasants were unhappy about not owning their own land. But because a cooperative’s har- vest was divided up according to how many hours of labor each family contributed, there were powerful reasons for everyone to work hard.

Mao Zedong casts his ballot in a 1953 election of the National People’s Congress, an assembly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. As chairman of the CCP, Mao ruled the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1976.

The Great Leap Forward In late 1957, Mao Zedong made a bold statement. He said that China should—and could—rapidly become one of the world’s leading economic powers. Thus was born the campaign known as the Great Leap Forward. It got under way in 1958. Mao’s plans called for huge gains in agricultural and indus- trial output. Those gains were supposed to occur in both sec- tors at the same time.

Nightmare in China

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