Dear Teacher,
The anti-rightist struggle was ended in 1958. I transferred out of my unit to do manual labor. It gave me many valuable experiences. I saw many Russian installations. I also narrated our translation of “Automatic Control of Rolling Mills” from Russian. I personally benefited considerably from this time.
I basically lived in solitude for two years. My schoolmates were assigned to other locations around the country. The remaining acquaintances I had kept clear of me and dared not even talk to me. I worked from dawn to dusk and read famous literary works in the remaining time.
The only dream I had left was to become a fugitive of China and go abroad. I dreamed of secretly escaping on a foreign ship on the Huangpu River in Shanghai. My brother had graduated from an “ocean-shipping” college and I learned from him the patterns of how ships passed in and out of port. My plan was that I would hide in a cabin. The only problem was that if you were discovered or were betrayed by foreigners, your life would be over unless you could swim hundreds of miles. And so, I only dreamed it, there was no such chance and I really did not have the courage to try.
Sincerely, Robert
JOAN’S BRIEF HISTORY OF CHINA—PART VII
By the end of the First Five-Year Plan in 1957 the Communists had achieved many real successes. The gross output value of agriculture doubled from 1949 to 1957. The output value of industry rose over 500%. Factory output almost trebled. Much of the improvement could be attributed to peacetime recovery, but the Communist Government took all of the credit.
The concept of the Great Leap Forward was completely different from the strategy of the First Five-Year Plan. There were reasons for a new approach.
In many respects the country remained backward with too great of a population of poor peasants. If the people of the countryside were mobilized there was a chance the entire nation would improve.
At the center of the new strategy was a system of people’s communes, which was proclaimed as a vital unit of the economy. The communes brought official authority and propaganda closer to each citizen. The Great Leap Forward was presented by propaganda as the will of the people mobilized to overthrow any negative. The problem is that there is a limit to what can be willed. There are two good examples. On the North China Plain there was a vast program of well-drilling to increase water for the crops. The problem was that the enthusiastic people did not realize that the water was brackish and actually reduced the fertility of the land. Another program was for ‘backyard blast furnaces.” But, it was discovered that small-scale plants with erratic temperature and quality control could never produce reliable pig iron and were totally useless for the production of steel. They actually turned good ore into trash.
The Great Leap Forward, by the speed with which it expanded enterprise and by its encouragement of local authority disrupted and taxed to the limit Communist administration. And with so much enthusiasm for great progress even greater progress was reported. The problem was that it was not accurate. Both the planning and the boom in the economy got out of hand and information sent to Beijing was quite inaccurate. The greatest problem was poor administration. Unit leaders all vied with each other to announce higher levels of production. It took some time before planners recognized and admitted the deception that was being practiced.
Sometimes decisions were based on this inaccurate information such as switching vast areas of land from growing grain to growing cotton. China kept exporting large amounts of grain when there wasn’t enough to feed its own people. People were starving to death. Between 16 to 27 million people died as a direct result of famine in 1959. This was proportionately worse than the disaster in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
The failure of the Great Leap and the disastrous famine, which accompanied it, placed further strain on the authority of central government. At the center of power, there was resentment and criticism of Mao Zedong. But, Peng Dehuai, who made the strongest and clearest criticisms of Mao, forced a choice between himself and Mao. Peng was dismissed and Mao continued to hold immense prestige as leader of the revolution despite his many faults since then.