Hundred Flowers Campaign and Great Leap Industry, 10/26/10.

Hundred Flowers Campaign


1. Mao's motive for launching the Hundred Flowers Campaign was because he felt that he was in touch with the people and he thought it would be a good time to let people express their satisfaction and approval of Communist China. This shows that Mao wanted recognition and praise. Additionally he was trying to do everything he could to prove that Hu Feng's challenges of Marxist-Leninist values (who stated that Marxist-Leninist values were not the only criteria for judging artistic merit) were not true.



Great Leap industry


1. By the 'Great Leap Forward', Mao was referring to the second Five Year Plan of 1958-1962. His goal was to turn China into a modern industrial state, eventually to overtake the other major nations in production. The idea of a 'leap' forward is that China would become an industrial state in a short amount of time and not go through the steps toward getting there as slowly as the other great nations did.

2. Mao planned to achieve industrial 'lift-off' through the following; 1) The collectivized peasants, working in their communes, would produce a surplus of food. This food would be sold to other nations and the money would support the expansion of Chinese industry, and 2) The workers would create with their own hands a modern industrial economy which would be powerful enough to compete with the Soviet Union and the capitalist West.


3. With the second Five Year Plan, the term 'plan' was only somewhat accurate. Quotas and targets were set but these numbers did not have any economic value, that is, they did not have a realistic basis but were rather pulled out of the air randomly due to Mao's faith in Communist China's ability to produce. Since the provided figures were changed so frequently it can be said that there was only a vague plan to achieve some sort of quota or target but it wasn't really a plan because there was no set course of action that was supposed to take place.

4. The government's aim in introducing SOE's (state-owned enterprises) was to bring industry under total government direction. Existing firms and businesses could no longer be privately owned but now would work for the state. Prices, output targets, and wages were also to be fixed by the state - there was no negotiation. The purpose overall was for the government to have greater control over industry.


5. Mao did not achieve the Great Leap Forward because China lacked many essentials such as technical skills, managerial kn0w-how, efficiently run factories and plants, and an adequate transport system. Without these there was no chance of China becoming industrialized enough to overtake the rest of the world. Also, the output of industrial goods actually fell during this time period rather than achieving growth as hoped for.


6. Factors that prevented the Great Leap Forward from achieving its full targets were;

a) The quality of China's finished products fell a long way short of meeting its domestic industrial needs.
b) Political interference made the plan impossible to manage purely as an economic enterprise.
c) Officials issued demands and threats aplenty, but hardly any detailed instructions as to how things were actually to be done.
d) Despite the setting up of SOEs, so much was left to the local initiative that China really bever was operated as an integrated national plan.
e) As a result, quality control became difficult to manage and sustain,
f) In 1960 the USSR stopped providing financial assistance, and then China could not afford half of the 300 industrial plants that the Soviet Union had been sponsoring, including a number of steel mills.

7. The major limitations in Mao's economic thinking were the belief in applied Communism always being successful, as well as his unacceptance of the fact that his policies were at fault. Therefore, he would have been unable to make improvements if he did not even acknowledge that improvements could have been made. He didn't acknowledge failure as a result of Communist planning failing but he interpreted it as an intervention of the bourgeoisie and backsliders. His idea was to blame the messenger. It can be seen that his main limitation was that he blamed issues that he was responsible for, on outside factors that really were not relevant, thus no improvements could ever be made to any of his plans or goals.