The Great Leap Forward

the great leap forward was Maos second five year plan from 1958-1962. He wanted to industralize china, and modernize the economy in the shortest amount of time.

His two goals were to produce a mass amount of grain and steel.

-mao had a belief that by producing a mass amount of steel, china would solve its economic problems. - Mao told families to build steel in their backyard -The purpose of backyard furnaces were so china could have a high production of steel. -people would burn valuable items to create any steel they could - the attemp was a failure -the porblem was that steel needs a specific formulia to be made right -all the steel was useless -authorities would take the steel and burry them but not tell mao, mao had no idea that they were useless

-Mao needed more grain for the cities and to feed the entire population of china -Mao organized the farmers into 70,000 communes to produce grain -All the peasents followed Lysenkos policy except it failed greatly -The crops were less plentiful and led to starvation -The communes promised the government a certain amount of crops by a certain time -the peasents weren't able to grow the amount of grops, but they gave the government the same amount as they asked -this lead to the peasants haing no food and starving to dealth This information was hidden from Mao because no one would tell him The goal of grain production was to increase it but it actually decreased.

-great leap forward lead to the greatest famine of all time -More than 30,000 million people starved to death -Mao blamed everyone else for his failure, would never admit he was wrong -Mao didn't have any knowledge to run an economic system.