A History Lesson: The Great Leap Forward

I read about this many years ago, but for some reason it has floated up in my consciousness lately. It's a chapter in Chinese history, and if you look hard enough, you might just see some important lessons there.

In the late 1950's, Communist Party Chairman and Beloved Leader Mao Zedong decided that he wanted to bring China into a modern era, to make the country great again, so he devised the Great Leap Forward.

One of the goals of the Great Leap was to convert from an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Part of the plan to accomplish this was to combine some farmers into communal farms and to send others to the city. A book I read years ago claimed that the central government actually gathered up metal tools from rural farmers and used the metal to try to create industrial machinery, leaving families with no implements for farming or, in some cases, cooking. Meanwhile, farmers were sent into factories or their own backyard furnaces to manufacture steel and iron, because, hey, anybody can do that. Except that the result was a lot of weak, unusable steel and iron.

At the time, if you were in government you could point out that this kind of fiorced transformation of an economy was unlikely to work, but Beloved Leader got rid of anyone who showed insufficient loyalty, and the only way to display loyalty was to agree that Mao's idea was awesome.

Agricultural experts had a bad feeling about Mao's ideas, so Mao simply got himself "experts" who had no real expertise at all, but were enthusiastic about the half-assed untested amatuer hour ideas they wanted to push. Foremost among these bozos was Russian Trofim Lysenko, Stalin's favorite hack geneticist, who had brillinat ideas like the notion that plants of the same species wouldn't compete and could therefor be planted really, really close together (this turns out to not be an actual thing). His ideas were dumb and bad, but they made Mao's plan look good, so he was in.

There was also a campaign to wipe out The Four Pests (mosquitoes, rats, flies, and sparrows), which wreaks all sorts of environmental havok.

All of this set the stage for a massive agricultural failure, which the Chinese government dealt with by lying. For several years, the actual crop output plummeted, but the official government reports said the crop output was increasing, because reality must never be allowed to interfere with an authoritarian's dreams. 

To say, "There isn't enough food and the people are starving," was seen as disloyal to Beloved Leader, so people didn't say it (and if a few did, they didn't say it more than once). All official sources reported the greatest crop surplus ever. 

End result? The Great Chinese Famine. Because nobody was keeping actual reality-based data, we don't know how many died, but estimates range from 15 to 55 million. 

So, in short, an authoritarian tries to force dramatic changes through sheer force of will, discounting expertise on both the large and small scale, then when things aren't working, simply demands that anyone who wants to keep his job must prove loyalty by supporting Beloved Leader's version of events, no matter how divorced from reality that might be. Bad ideas covered by authoritarian lies and bullshit, followed by disaster. 

For some reason, it's been on my mind lately.