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The Great Leap. With patience, some economists believe, Communist China could have been very largely self-sufficient by about 1967. But Mao, with his rigid dogmatism, was impatient. In 1957, he launched his Great Leap Forward—a single heroic burst that would overnight transform China into a modern nation. The targets were preposterous—e.g., a 33% annual increase in industrial production—and so were the demands made on the people. "In those days, the workers never went home," a factory manager told Austrian Journalist Hugo Portisch. "They stayed at their machines twelve, 14, 16 or 20 hours at a time. They had only one goal: to do all they could." Vast armies of blue-tunicked men and women toiled over irrigation projects, dams and thousands of backyard steel furnaces. In less than two years, it was clear that the Great Leap had thrust China backward.
Mao was shunted aside in the intraparty battles that followed the failure. A group of more pragmatic men, led by President Liu Shao-chi, set out to repair the damage. They were on the way to succeeding when Mao began stirring again. "Those in China now under the age of 20 have never fought a war and have never seen an imperialist or known capitalism in power," he told American Author Edgar Snow in 1965. He feared that the young, without the rigors of revolution to test them as he had been tested, were getting soft. The ideological split with the Soviet Union was by now forbiddingly wide, and Mao feared that China would eventually follow the Soviet example: a revolution that had been sold out, turning bourgeois in its concern for consumer goods and comforts rather than self-sacrifice and struggle. His antidote, the prescription of an aging revolutionary romantic, was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Like the Great Leap, it was a quixotic undertaking, one that was intended not only to rid him of rivals like Liu and break up the fossilized party and state bureaucracy, but also to radicalize China and revitalize its revolutionary ardor.
Mao launched the great purge in
1966, and the whirlpool quickly engulfed the nation. Under the assault of the youthful Red Guards, Mao's fanatic shock troops, the party and government bureaucracies were badly battered and leaders like President Liu Shao-chi were humiliated and ousted. The economy ground down. Schools were closed for almost two years; when
Asahi Shimbun Correspondent lyeshige Akioka visited Tung Chi University in Shanghai this month, he discovered that there would be graduating classes this year and next—but none after that. No one seemed to know when enrollment would resume. Factional clashes became brutal; at one point in the struggle, corpses floated down the Pearl River from Canton and washed ashore in Hong Kong. Mao finally backed down and called in the army to restore control.