At a party leadership meeting in Nanning, Mao Zedong pressed for a nationwide “leap” in production through mass mobilization—an early top-level push that helped set the Great Leap Forward in motion.
The PRC launched the Four Pests Campaign as a nationwide public-health and pest-eradication drive; it soon included mass killing of sparrows, which disrupted ecosystems and worsened agricultural conditions during the Great Leap era.
An early “people’s commune” experiment at Chayashan in Henan abolished private plots and introduced communal kitchens—features that were later expanded nationwide as the Great Leap’s basic rural institution.
A major Yellow River flood in July 1958 inundated large areas and mobilized millions for flood-fighting, contributing to neglected fields and compounding strains on food production during the Great Leap.
At Politburo meetings in August 1958, top leaders decided to make people’s communes the standard organizational form across rural China, accelerating collectivization and reshaping local governance and daily life.
An enlarged Politburo meeting at Beidaihe adopted a formal resolution to establish people’s communes in rural areas and raised production targets, helping drive the Great Leap Forward to its peak later in 1958.
Mass campaigns promoted small, improvised “backyard furnaces” to boost steel output. Many furnaces produced low-quality pig iron, while labor and tools were diverted away from agriculture and essential production.
Food shortages escalated into the Great Chinese Famine, widely dated 1959–1961. Scholars attribute the catastrophe to a combination of Great Leap policies (including procurement and reporting incentives) and adverse weather, with death toll estimates in the tens of millions.
At Lushan (July–August 1959), CCP leaders debated the Great Leap Forward. Peng Dehuai’s criticisms were treated as a political challenge; his purge signaled a hardening line despite worsening rural conditions.
Following the Lushan Conference, Mao initiated the Anti-Right Deviation Struggle to purge alleged “right opportunists,” penalizing large numbers of party members and reinforcing pressures that encouraged inflated reporting and harsh enforcement in the countryside.
By early 1960, the government began repealing key Great Leap measures—reducing the pace of mass campaigns and reversing parts of the commune system (including restoration of some private plots and tools) as the economic and food crisis intensified.
After ecological and agricultural damage became harder to ignore, authorities stopped killing sparrows and replaced them in the “Four Pests” list (commonly with bedbugs), marking a policy reversal within the broader Great Leap period.
At a major Beijing work conference (attended by over 7,000 officials), leaders reviewed the Great Leap’s failures and famine. Mao made self-criticism, while Liu Shaoqi emphasized policy errors; the meeting helped consolidate the post-Leap “readjustment” course.
Great Leap Forward (1958–1962)
