In September–October 1957, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership endorsed a faster development strategy that soon became the Great Leap Forward. It emphasized rapid growth through mass mobilization and political campaigns, rather than gradual, expert-led planning. This set the stage for radical rural reorganization the next year.
Early in 1958, local officials in Henan set up experimental large-scale rural collectives that helped inspire later nationwide policies. These early trials tested pooling labor and resources across many villages under tighter political control. They became a practical model used to justify much larger “people’s communes.”
In February 1958, authorities formally launched the Four Pests campaign, targeting rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The campaign linked public health and agriculture to political mobilization, pushing communities to organize mass “extermination” drives. The anti-sparrow effort later contributed to ecological imbalance that worsened harvest problems.
From August 17–30, 1958, the CCP Politburo met at Beidaihe and approved the Resolution on Establishing People’s Communes in Rural Areas (adopted August 29). The resolution promoted merging smaller cooperatives into very large units intended to combine farming, local industry, education, and militia functions. This decision accelerated the commune movement across China.
In 1958, the Great Leap Forward pushed “backyard furnaces” to raise steel output using small local blast furnaces in communes and neighborhoods. Large numbers of rural workers were diverted from farming, and households and villages often melted metal tools and goods to meet targets. Much of the output was low-quality pig iron, while agricultural work suffered.
By late 1958, communes rapidly replaced earlier rural collectives across most of the countryside. Many areas introduced communal kitchens and reorganized work into large teams under cadre direction, aiming to free labor for big projects and local industry. The speed of reorganization often outpaced effective management and local conditions.
From 1959 to 1961, China experienced a catastrophic famine affecting large parts of the country. Grain procurement quotas were often based on inflated production reports, while commune policies and labor diversions reduced effective farm output. Researchers estimate tens of millions of excess deaths, though precise totals are debated.
At the July–August 1959 Lushan Conference, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai criticized problems with the Great Leap Forward. Mao and other leaders treated the critique as a political threat, and Peng was removed from office. The resulting “Anti-Right Deviation” campaign discouraged honest reporting and made it harder to correct failing rural policies quickly.
By early 1960, the government began pulling back from the most disruptive Great Leap Forward measures. Some private plots and household-side production were gradually tolerated again, and the most extreme commune practices were scaled back in many places. These changes aimed to restore basic food production and reduce rural chaos.
In March 1960, top leaders ordered an end to the campaign to kill sparrows, replacing sparrows with bedbugs as an official “pest” target. The earlier extermination had reduced a major predator of crop-damaging insects, contributing to ecological stress on agriculture. The policy shift reflected growing recognition of unintended consequences from mass campaigns.
From January 11 to February 7, 1962, more than 7,000 officials gathered in Beijing to assess the Great Leap Forward and the famine. Mao made a public self-criticism and then stepped back from day-to-day economic management, while Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping gained more influence over recovery policies. The meeting marked a turning point from radical mobilization toward more pragmatic economic measures.
Although Great Leap Forward policies were rolled back after 1960–1962, people’s communes remained the main rural administrative structure for decades. Communes continued (with significant internal adjustments) until the early reform era replaced them with township-level government structures. The commune era formally ended in 1983, closing the institutional legacy of the Great Leap Forward’s rural model.
China's People's Communes and the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962)