Successful Great Leap Forward

Produced thousands of tons of steel; industrial

production doubled
Much infrastructure built bridges, dams,
Tiananmen Square
750 000 collectives turned to 70 000
communes to free workers for industry
Experimented with new farming technologies,
but mainly driven by intense manual labour
crop yield increased 37%
Planning and enforcement was localized
instead of central

Failed Great Leap Forward

Steel was such poor quality that it was
unusable; did not out-produce Britain and US
Planning and management was insufficient and
uncoordinated so many projects did not see
return for their worth
Communes made of hundreds of thousands of
families, so were inefficient
Chinese govt set quotas, prices, distribution of
industry and agricultural product based on
impressing Mao communes lied about
production; 50 million peasants starved to
death
Mao blamed failures on hoarding farmers,
municipal incompetency and droughts; made
President Liu and General Secretary Deng
solve famine