One of Mao Zedong's more memorable post-1949 sayings was “Where do correct ideas come from?” They do not fall from the sky, he stated, nor are they innate in the minds of men. Instead, he argued, correct ideas emerge from social practice, and social practice alone. Using the terminology of present-day political science, Mao's words might be paraphrased: “Where do political preferences come from?” This book takes the position that preferences and policies in China also emerge from social practice, and uses this insight to examine the interplay of economic, bureaucratic, and leadership factors that gave rise to the Great Leap Forward (GLF) of 1958–1960. Particular attention is paid to the period from September 1956 to October 1957, one of the great turning points in the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Beginning in mid 1956, and greatly accelerating after the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in September 1956, reformist ideas appeared on China's political agenda. In the economic realm, Chinese leaders called for the market to supplement the planned economy and challenged the heretofore dominant position of heavy industry as China's top economic priority. The leaders may also have tried to orient their country's foreign trade toward broader relations with noncommunist nations. In the political realm, even more fundamental changes were considered. For a brief time during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Party encouraged Chinese citizens, especially intellectuals, to come forward and voice their opinions about the state of the nation.

The ultimate power of decision in China in the mid 1950s lay in the hands of the half-dozen members of the Politburo Standing Committee, which, as determined at the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, was composed of Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Chen Yun, and Deng Xiaoping. Among these six leaders, Mao's position was supreme. He was not just first among equals; his power and position in the political system were unparalleled. He had unique ideological, experiential, and charismatic sources of authority. His political skills far surpassed those of his colleagues on the Standing Committee, and his determination to have his way was implacable.

That Mao had these sources of power, however, does not mean he necessarily chose to use them. In the mid 1950s, he was relatively open to the ideas and suggestions of others. He had some sense of his own limitations and lack of knowledge, and he delegated authority to others to implement, and at times initiate, policy. Other Chinese leaders saw Mao's strength as his ability to set the major direction for policy, to formulate overall priorities, to identify and present general guidelines for solving the “principal contradiction.” He was a “big-ideas man,” not a master of details. His own ideology was undergoing change in the mid 1950s, and his views were not entirely consistent. He usually adhered to a collective, consultative style of decision making.

This book argues that the actions of Mao Zedong were constrained by the workings of institutions in China. This contradicts much of the conventional wisdom about Mao's power, and some may find my statement that Mao was constrained by the bureaucracy problematic. Let me try to explain clearly what I mean by constraints and give evidence of Mao's being constrained.

The nature of the constraints on Mao

By constraints I mean limitations on personal autonomy. In particular, in this study I mean, first, Mao's range of choice was significantly narrowed and his choices were channeled along a few limited paths. Second, not infrequently, Mao's explicit preferences were not heeded by the bureaucracy. Finally, Mao perceived himself as being denied a leading role in economic affairs owing to the operations of economic institutions. Evidence on all of these points will be presented shortly.

My use of “constraint” thus goes beyond the trite understanding that in the process of information gathering, organizations bias the representation of reality to serve their interests and distort implementation through the effects of standard operating procedures. To be sure, Mao and other Chinese leaders were constrained in this way. But these constraints are so pervasive that it is hard to imagine any leader of a large country in the twentieth century being free of them.

This book has examined the origins of China's Great Leap Forward from the vantage point of the interplay of three different coalitions of political actors. Each coalition presented a program of economic and social change to cope with the problems facing China's political economy in 1956–1957 and the specific difficulties confronting important bureaucracies in carrying out their organizational missions. The top leaders had some autonomy in deciding on policies, but their freedom of choice was circumscribed by the proposals put forward by the coalitions within the state. Thus, Mao Zedong did not think up the Great Leap Forward on his own. Rather, he and the Chinese Communist Party coopted the program associated with the planning and heavy industry coalition and coupled it with demands for mass mobilization in the countryside and a greatly accelerated growth rate.

This chapter expands on the broader historical and analytical findings and issues of this study and covers the larger implications of the patterns of China's political economy as revealed in the origins of the Great Leap Forward. The main sections deal with the choices available to China's leadership in 1956–1957, the nature of China's coalitional politics, larger patterns of China's politics, and the sources of policy evolution and change in China. A brief afterword compares political and economic developments in 1957 with those in 1989.

The choices available to the leadership in 1956–1957

The year from September 1956 to September 1957 represents a lost reform in the history of the People's Republic of China.

The two agendas of the CCP in 1956–1957 – economic management and political development – were reintegrated at the Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in September–October 1957. The plenum represented the last stand of the financial coalition in its attempt to change the system of economic control. Its spokesmen made telling points, but the reinjection of political concerns into economic issues doomed their efforts. The planning coalition pushed its program, and Mao decisively sided with the planners, inserting into their scheme his own concern for even faster rates of advance. A temporary alliance among planners, leaders, and the Party was formed, with the planners supplying most of the economic plans and the Party and leadership providing mass mobilization and demands for extremely rapid growth. The alliance proved unstable, and within a short time the leadership and the Party supplanted the planners. Nonetheless, the planning coalition's priorities were still central to the emerging Great Leap Forward; heavy industrial interests, especially the metallurgical industry, were well satisfied by the Leap; and planners did much better politically in the Leap than did budgeteers. Yet when the leadership gradually became aware of the errors in its policies, the leadership and Mao in particular turned to the financial coalition, and above all to Chen Yun, to restore balance.

This chapter concentrates on the deliberations of the Third Plenum and briefly surveys the Great Leap Forward from the perspective of the two main economic coalitions.

The convocation of the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in September 1956 marked a fundamental transition in the relationship between the Chinese state and Chinese society. By mid 1956 the outcome of the transition to socialism had been decided. All the institutional arrangements the Chinese leadership then associated with a socialist state (collectives in the rural sector, effective state ownership of the means of production, and an articulated bureaucratic structure) were then in place. These institutions and the policies that had spawned them were not functioning very well, but the transition period had been completed.

Chinese leaders were justifiably proud of the rapid progress they had made. But once the clear and well-defined tasks of the transition period were accomplished – a decade or more ahead of schedule – the historical experience of the Soviet Union and the existing ideological and policy visions of the Chinese leadership became much less relevant. The fundamental goal of building a powerful socialist state remained, but that goal would not be achieved in the near future, and its attainment seemed to require the somewhat mechanical process of adding new industrial facilities. To be sure, the leadership was concerned about the problems caused by abrupt collectivization of the countryside and the transition to socialism in the urban areas, and many officials were preoccupied with trying to make the new institutions work more efficiently.

The center of economic reform proposals in 1956–1957 was the coalition of interests associated with the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Commerce, and the Ministry of Agriculture. The leaders of these and other bureaucracies articulated a series of policies from late 1956 into 1957 that if sustained over time (and implemented reasonably effectively) would have changed China from a centrally planned, Soviet-style economy to one that combined market and planned elements. The priority for heavy industry and the high levels of investment in metallurgical and machine building industries associated with centrally planned economies would have been lessened, and more attention would have been devoted to consumer goods, agriculture, and consumption levels. It is not possible to determine whether a true market socialist economy would have developed in China as a result of these reforms. Yet this was the direction in which Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, and other ranking figures were pushing China's political economy.

The financial, or budgeteer, coalition sought both to circumscribe and to undermine the power of planning and heavy industry in the Chinese economy, and to constrain the ability of political generalists to intervene in economic decision making. Changes in rules, procedures, and patterns of policy making were all part of the financial coalition's reform proposals. In its efforts to limit interventions by nonspecialists, this group received support from the planning coalition and from a number of top leaders.

The coalition of planning and heavy industrial organizations and leaders was on the political defensive in the fall of 1956. Overinvestment in capital construction was most pronounced in the heavy industrial sector. The small leap of 1956 served the interests of heavy industry by adding new fixed assets to that sector but also resulted in planners' losing control of economic activity. Since the small leap could not be sustained, planners felt it was imperative to restore order to economic processes. How, then, could they serve the interests of this coalition while responding effectively to the difficult economic environment of late 1956 and early 1957? Precisely at this time, the financial coalition was pressing its agenda of reform an financial control. This posed an additional challenge to the leaders of the planning coalition. Faced with the financial coalition's innovative program of economic change, incorporating the market and increased priority for financial indicators as methods of macroeconomic management, what was the planning coalition to do in order to regain its position at the center of state economic administration?

The answers to these questions formulated by the two top planners, Li Fuchun and Bo Yibo, and their associates would be both profound and disastrous. They too developed an innovative program, but it was based on self-reliance, industry aiding agriculture, emphasis on building more small and medium-size factories, and decentralization.