A Great Leap

Mao was an egalitarian, with little respect for intellectuals and the educated. He had called intellectuals the most ignorant of people, and he had described China's common folk the fountain of wisdom and the hope of the future. Mao wanted no elite in China -- no elite outside of the Communist Party, and he was not enthusiastic about an elite within the Party. Party people, he believed, should learn from the masses.

Mao saw what he believed to be arrogant Party cadres lording it over people. He responded by supporting a new freedom of expression, a campaign in 1956 with a slogan that referred to ideas as flowers: "Let a Hundred Flowers bloom!" The Party launched the campaign believing that love of the Party and its ideas was sufficiently secure among the masses. By mid-1957 the Party withdrew the campaign. Criticism was too strong for Mao and other Party members, and in the place of the Hundred Flowers campaign came a new campaign advocating class struggle against "Rightists." Discipline was to be maintained in the dissemination of ideas. Mao did not want bad ideas to spread and demoralize the masses in which he had placed his hopes. He did not want the fountainhead of the masses to become polluted.

Mao remained concerned about the rise of an educated elite: specialists in technology, engineers and economists. And he remained concerned about a bureaucratic elite that included Party members. Mao was concerned also about the drift of people from the countryside into the cities -- which he saw taking place also outside China. Mao wanted order and economic advancement superior to what was taking place in other less-developed nations, and he believed he could accomplish this by turning the economy over to the spontaneity of the masses. To jump-start this spontaneity Mao developed a new program, and he called his program the "Great Leap Forward."

The Great Leap Forward was advertised as a technological revolution -- as the proletarianization of the economy preceding mechanization of the economy. Developing agriculture was to have priority, and in place of creating heavy industry, light industry was to be dispersed across the land. Relying on the masses, the government dismissed its economists and centralized economic planning. The government would continue to collect taxes and requisition grain, but the masses would mobilize themselves and run things spontaneously at the local level.

Mao wanted to move faster in the direction of the communism of which Marx had spoken, with an abolition of differences between rich and poor and abolition of divisions in labor. Mao wanted everyone to become an economic and managerial expert. He looked forward to a new generation of cultured laborers and people who had acquired skills in a variety of trades.