Political consequences of the Great Leap Forward

What happened at the CCP Central Committee meeting in December 1958?

• Mao announced that the commune system was now successfully in place.

• He declared that the harvest figure for the year had been a record of 430 million tonnes of grain but in reality it was probably only 200 million tonnes

• Mao announced that he was stepping down as Chairman of the PRC while remaining Chairman of the Party claiming he didn’t like the formal duties and handed them over the Liu Shaoqi. This could be seen as a tactical retreat that would make it easier to shift the blame onto other should the GLF come into any trouble

Who was Peng Dehuai?

The Defence Minister. He was very independently-minded and would speak out against Mao e.g. he challenged Mao’s leadership during the Long March period. Peng was very popular so he could not just be dispensed with.

What did Peng do from 1958-1959?

• In the autumn of 1958 Peng conducted visits to the provinces where he saw first hand the problems with the GLF with crops being left to rot while farmers worked the backyard furnaces instead and awful famine.

• He embarked on a tour of Eastern Europe and Russia but his concerns about the growing famine received little sympathy.

Peng sent Mao a hand-written letter outlining some of his concerns about the Great Leap Forward. When was this?

July 14th 1959

Mao took the letter as an attack to his own authority and published it and then confronted it at the Lushan Conference.

When was the Lushan Conference?

July 1959

What happened at the Lushan Conference?

The aim of the conference was to discuss the progress of the GLF.

Mao challenged the delegates to line up either with himself or Peng. Peng’s chances of surviving were ruined when Khrushchev made a critical speech in Russia which made similar points made by Peng. This made it look as though Peng had gone behind Mao’s back to brief Khrushchev.

Who spoke up for Peng at the Lushan Conference?

Only the aged Marshal Zhu De. Lui Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping developed convenient illnesses that prevented them from attending the meeting and Zhou Enlai was so ashamed of his failure to stand by Peng he drank himself into a stupor in his room.

What happened to Peng Dehuai after the Lushan Conference?

Peng was purged and replaced by Lin Biao as Defence Minister and head of the PLA. Peng took up residence in southern Beijing and worked as a farmer.

He was subjected to self-critisism sessions and forced to admit that his letter and the comments he made against the GLF during the conference were not isolated incidents but ‘anti-party, anti-people, anti-socialist mistakes of a rightist opportunist nature’