blast furnaces. He claimed that in fifteen years, China would catch up with British steel production. The only problem was that there was no feasible way of meeting these targets. To meet the plan’ s goals, scrap metal had to be found, and people would have to melt down their pots and pans and even their agricultural implements such as hoes and plows. Workers who ought to have been tending the fields were making steel by destroying their plows, and thus their future ability to feed themselves and the country. The result was a calamitous famine in the Chinese countryside. Though scholars debate the role of Mao’ s policy compared with the impact of droughts at the same time, nobody doubts the central role of the Great Leap Forward in contributing to the death of between twenty and forty million people. We don’ t know precisely how many, because China under Mao did not collect the numbers that would have documented the atrocities. Per capita income fell by around one-quarter.
One consequence of the Great Leap Forward was that a senior member of the Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, a very successful general during the revolution, who led an“ anti-rightist” campaign resulting in the execution of many“ enemies of the revolution,” had a change of heart. At a conference in Guangzhou in the south of China in 1961, Deng argued,“ No matter whether the cat is black or white, if it catches mice, it’ s a good cat.” It did not matter whether policies appeared communist or not; China needed policies that would encourage production so that it could feed its people.
Yet Deng was soon to suffer for his newfound practicality. On May 16, 1966, Mao announced that the revolution was under threat from“ bourgeois” interests that were undermining China’ s communist society and wishing to recreate capitalism. In response, he announced the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, usually referred to as the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was based on sixteen points. The first started:
Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, and customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses,