Agriculture + Industry

Question 1

What was Mao’s aims for agriculture and what were not his aims?

Answer 1

• Aimed for China to be considered a modern superpower
• Did not aim to improve the peoples standard of living

Question 2

When was the Agrarian Reform Law launched?

Answer 2

1950

Question 3

What was the main aim of the Agrarian Reform Law?

Answer 3

to destroy the ‘gentry-landlord’ class

Question 4

What happened to landlords during the Agrarian Reform Law?

Answer 4

-Landlords who exploited the poor
peasants who rented their land would have their property seized
- Many would be sentenced to death and their land redistributed ‘to the tiller’

Question 5

What was the problems with implementing Agrarian Reform law in the North?

Answer 5

In the north, where the communists had been in
control even before 1949, land reform had already begun. However, only 10% to 15% of farmers rented their land; exploitation by cruel, greedy and often absent landlords was not really a problem

Question 6

What was the problems with implementing Agrarian Reform law in the South?

Answer 6

In the South, where the GMD had retained control before it had escaped to Taiwan, land reform had not yet begun. Communist Party organisation was weaker and the landlords more influential

Question 7

Overall problems with implementing Agrarian Land Reform:

Answer 7

• Often land ownership and agricultural production was organised by clans with a wide range of members from different classes. The communist language of ‘class conflict’ and ‘feudal exploitation’ by greedy landlords had little meaning
• A large number of clans were based on family ties or kinship relationships. Many peasants were not convinced of the need to seize the land of family members in the clan and certainly did not seek their death

Question 8

What were the attacks on landlords?

Answer 8

• work teams hastily trained and sent to the countryside to organise land reform, they had little understanding of the conditions
• peasants encouraged to round up landlords where they were subjected to struggle meetings + forced to admit their crimes + often sentenced to death
• landlords made an easy target through which the communists could generate a sense of class consciousness

Question 9

Impact of land reform

Answer 9

• By the summer of 1952, the ‘land to the tiller’ movement had been largely completed
• An estimated 88 per cent of households had
  taken part, with 43 per cent of the land redistributed to 60 per cent of the population
• Rural population boomed
• Between 1950 and 1952 total agricultural production increased at a rate of 15 per cent per annum
• landlords destroyed, 1 - 2 million executed

Question 10

How many landlords were executed during Land Reform?

Answer 10

1 - 2 million

Question 11

What did agricultural production increase by per annum from 1950 - 1952?

Answer 11

15% per annum

Question 12

When was the Great Leap forward announced?

Answer 12

Announced at the Eighth CCP congress of May 1958

Question 13

What did the Agrarian Reform Law fail to achieve?

Answer 13

The required increase in production

Question 14

When were MAT’s introduced?

Answer 14

December 1951

Question 15

How large were Mutual Aid Teams?

Answer 15

ten or fewer households

Question 16

Why did the CCP set up Voluntary Agricultural Producers Co-operatives (APC’s)

Answer 16

Mutual Aid Teams were pragmatic and popular. Yet communist leaders were worried that they still allowed the continued existence of capitalist ideas like the buying and selling of land, the hiring of labourers and the lending of money

Question 17

When were APC’s introduced?

Answer 17

1953

Question 18

What did APC’s mean for the peasants?

Answer 18

• Land was now also shared, reorganised into a single unit
• Once the harvest was collected + state took its share, peasants recieved either money or grain
• Land still privately owned
• 30 - 50 households

Question 19

How did APC’s fail?

Answer 19

• The peasants did not want to share their newly acquired land and only 14 per cent of peasants joined the new units
• rich peasants especially resistent, some slaughtered their animals rather than give them up to the APC
• results were dissapointing - in 1953 + 1954 productoon had risen less than 2%

Question 19

By June 1955 how many households were in APC’s?

Answer 19

16.9 million out of 100 million

Question 20

Which gradualists claimed China was not yet ready for large-scale farming in the mid 50’s?

Answer 20

Liu Shaoqi + Zhou Enlai

Question 21

What was the membership of peasant farmers in APCs in December 1956?

Answer 21

96%

Question 22

How many peasant households in APCs by December 1955?

Answer 22

63.3%

Question 23

How much did grain production rise in 1957?

Answer 23

1%

Question 24

Why could the CCP not follow the same ruthless methods as the USSR?

Answer 24

70% of the CCP were from rural backgrounds

Question 25

How was collectivisation a success for Mao?

Answer 25

• The fact it was carried out quickly was a tribute to his authority within the party and meant he outmanoeuvred key opponents eg. Zhou Enlai.
• The state now owned the means of production of food, the land, which 90% of the population worked on

Question 26

When was the great famine?

Answer 26

1958 - 1962

Question 27

Up to how many died during the great famine?

Answer 27

30 million

Question 28

When was the first commune established?

Answer 28

July 1958

Question 29

How many were in communes by the end of 1958?

Answer 29

99%

Question 30

What was the average size of a commune?

Answer 30

5500 households

Question 31

What was the goal of the communes?

Answer 31

• for them to be entirely self-sufficient
• move closer to a communist society
• the ‘iron women’ - more equality for women

Question 32

How did communes negatively impact family life?

Answer 32

• traditional family meal was replaced by eating in massive mess halls, surrounded by strangers
• Parents lost influence over the raising of their children
• Grandparents became isolated from their relatives

Question 33

How were mess halls in the communes inefficient?

Answer 33

Time was wasted travelling the often long distances to the mess hall while the food was of poor quality, causing diets to worsen

Question 34

Why did Mao believe the grain was being eaten by sparrows?

Answer 34

Production did not rise enough in the communes

Question 35

What was the Four Pests Campaign and when?

Answer 35

• In 1958
• Mao launched the Four Pests Campaign, dedicated to ridding China of sparrows that ate grain, as well as rats, flies and mosquitoes

Question 36

What did the Four Pests Campaign involve?

Answer 36

• Party activists were sent to villages to encourage peasants to chase sparrows, making a noise by banging drums or pounding pots and pans to scare them from landing.
• A small reward was paid for the bodies of the birds.
• Mao declared that children as young as five should climb trees to knock down nests.

Question 37

How did the Four Pests Campaign backfire?

Answer 37

• Crops lay rotting in the fields as villagers wasted their time desperately hunting for vermin or chasing sparrows
• Worse still, the ‘sparrowcide’ reduced the number of birds who normally ate caterpillars. The greatly increased caterpillar population attacked and ate the crops, devouring the harvest

Question 38

How did Lysenkoism make the Four Pests Campaign even worse?

Answer 38

• The ideas of Lysenko were bullshit
• The devotion to the campaign caused a lack of labour - agricultural production dropped
• Cadres refused to report this failure + the estatic party simply increased the ambitious quotas even more

Question 39

When was the First Five Year Plan?

Answer 39

1952 - 56

Question 40

What did the First Five Year Plan focus on?

Answer 40

heavy industry - copying the soviets

Question 41

How much did Russia loan China for the First Five Year Plan?

Answer 41

$300 million

Question 42

How many Soviet industrial experts did Russia send China for the First Five Year Plan?

Answer 42

11,000

Question 43

Targets of the First Five Year Plan:

Answer 43

• A high rate of growth, particularly in heavy industry such as steel and coal production
• self-sufficiency
• construction of modern industrial plants
• A very high level of grain procurement at fixed prices - in 1953 the state planned to procure 22 million tons of grain
• stimulate the transformation towards a socialist society

Question 44

Sucesses of First Five Year Plan:

Answer 44

• The annual growth rate averaged 16 per cent
• Heavy industrial output nearly tripled
• Industrial output grew 15.5 per cent per year, outstripping the target of 14.7 per cent
• The standard of living of industrial workers improved as they had greater job security.
• With greater urbanisation, the CCP was able to heighten its influence over the population

Question 45

Failures of the First Five Year Plan:

Answer 45

• The Plan was dependent on loans from the Soviet Union which had very high interest rates
• In order to meet the very demanding repayment schedules farmers were forced to sell their crops to the state at low prices
• The value of agricultural output grew only an average of 2.1 per cent per year, a sharp decline from the rate of 14.1 per cent achieved during 1949–52
• Increases in factory production depended upon a co-operative and healthy working class, but not enough food was being imported into the cities to feed them
• The supply of consumer goods was very low
• Despite Soviet advice, the Chinese still lacked organisational and management experience.
• there was little investment in improving the healthcare or
  education systems.

Question 46

What was the Second Five-Year Plan and when?

Answer 46

The Great Leap Forward
1958 - 62

Question 47

Why did Mao launch the Great Leap Forward?

Answer 47

• Mao was desperate to transform China into a great economic power as Khrushchev had just promised the USSR would overtake the US
• He was optimistic as industrial production had risen by 18.3 per cent during the First Five-Year Plan
• Mao’s optimism was further enhanced because it appeared that the communists were winning the Cold War
• Mao wanted to achieve what was termed ‘Walking on Two Legs’: increasing both agricultural and industrial production at the same time. The regime declared that
  ‘General Steel’ and ‘General Grain’ were in charge of the economy
• Mao believed that the people’s sheer force of will would be enough to overcome all technological obstacles

Question 48

Successes of the Great Leap Forward:

Answer 48

• Tiananmen Square remodelled into a modern urban space but many historical buildings had to be knocked down
• Communes got more communist, people shared everything

Question 49

FAILURE OF GLF: Absurd targets

Answer 49

• Government officials knew that the best way to advance their careers was to impress Mao, and they did this by telling him that his economic policies would achieve unheard-of economic improvements
• For example, in January
  1958 the Ministry of Metallurgy declared that it would more than double steel production to 20 million tonnes by 1962 and reach 100 million by 1977

Question 50

FAILURE OF GLF: What was Mao convinced of?

Answer 50

• Mao let himself be convinced that the mobilisation of the masses could overcome all practical obstacles. He lost all sense of reality
• He was overconfident, after the purges of enemies in the 1950’s, nobody would challenge him

Question 51

FAILURE OF GLF: The anti-rightist campaigns effects

Answer 51

• The Anti-Rightist Campaign meant
  that there were no intellectuals or experts left to offer advice or provide rational economic planning

Question 52

FAILURES OF GLF: Consequence of backyard furnaces

Answer 52

• Cadres hopes to impressed party leadership by meeting unrealistic goals, cooking implements, woks were melted
• • wood from furniture, doors + roofs burnt for the furnace
• therefore steel of poor quality and useless
• with so many working on the backyard furnaces food was left to rot in the fields

Question 53

FAILURES OF GLF: What had producted declined by in 1962?

Answer 53

40%

Question 54

GLF: Why did the government demand higher quotas of grain extracted?

Answer 54

• Out of fear, Cadres lied and the gov believed there was a surplus of grain

Question 55

Rural death rate before great famine and in 1960

Answer 55

11 per 1000 to 29 per 1000

Question 56

Negative lifestyle effects of the great famine?

Answer 56

• birth rates dropped
• disease rised
• children + elderly in particular died from malnutrition
• cannibalism
• women forced into prostitution
• 30 - 50 million died

Question 57

Ways in which the great famine wasn’t Mao’s fault:

Answer 57

• 60% of cultivated land was affected by either flood or drought
• Khrushchev recalled Soviet scientific advisors in 1960

Question 58

When was the Lushan Conference?

Answer 58

1959

Question 59

What was the Lushan Conference?

Answer 59

• Minister of Defence Peng Dehuai wrote to Mao about incorrect reporting + Mao accused him of criticism +_ rightism
• lost his job

Question 60

Who took over from Mao as key policy makers after the GLF?

Answer 60

Liu Shaoqi + Deng Xiaoping

Question 61

What did Liu Shaoqi do in Jan 1962?

Answer 61

Gave a speech to 7000 party cadres that dismissed Mao’s claim that success outweighed failure by 9 to 1 + said it was not weather that caused the failure

Question 62

Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping’s post GLF pragmatist policies

Answer 62

• communes scaled back so peasants could produce what they wanted
• allowed to trade what they wanted on the free market
• experts + intellectuals return to influence

Question 63

Successes of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping’s post GLF pragmatist policies

Answer 63

• By 1965 agricultural production had recovered from the disastrous Great Leap Forward, back to the same level as 1957
• private plots provided an incentive for harder work
• By the end of 1962 the availability of tools had been restored to the level that they had been before the communes.
• Production of consumer goods was double the 1957 level