In any regime—especially highly totalitarian ones—political dissent is frowned upon, even if such dissent is given with the intention to improve society. Chinese society during the Great Leap Forward followed that trope to a tee, which directly led to excessive grain procurement from the People’s Communes. During these three years, the CCP required People’s Communes to turn over certain quantities of grain that would then be redistributed to the rest of society. The quotas set by the CCP were extremely high and typically left the rural peasants with little to no grain for themselves. Thus, through excessive grain procurement, the CCP brought famine to the doorstep of the majority of its citizens, resulting in the death of tens of millions of innocent people.
The totalitarian, hierarchical structure of China during the Great Leap Forward silenced all dissent and crushed those who dared utter criticism: “Regardless of what kind of person went into the totalitarian system, all came out as conjoined twins facing in opposite directions: either despot or slave, depending on their position respective to those above or below them.”1Yang Jisheng, Tombstone (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), 21. Even Mao, this mold’s creator, fell prey to it, and “[his] own actions were to a certain extent also beyond his control. No one had the power to resist such a system.”2Jisheng, Tombstone, 21. Thus, when grain yields were set unreasonably high, the hostile environment in the CCP’s government prevented any corrective action.
This social climate was set in stone after the Lushan Conference in 1959, a meeting of many top Chinese Communist officials. Zhang Zhongliang, the provincial first party secretary, attended this conference; while he was there, a committee in his province wrote to the CCP without his consent about the extreme food scarcity and grain shortages.3Jisheng, Tombstone, 114. This report could have been a turning point in the Great Leap Forward at which the Chinese Communit Party lowered grain quotas, reconstructed agricultural laws, and considered the ramifications of their actions. Instead, the communique was taken as rightist propaganda and fueled Zhongliang and Mao’s retaliation: a campaign against right deviation following the Lushan Conference subjected “anyone who spoke the truth […] to ruthless struggle and merciless attacks.” By creating an environment in which even the truth was taboo, Mao made it impossible to criticize his extreme grain quotas, effectively ensuring the Great Chinese Famine.
Chairman Mao set the first of these grain targets around 1958, immediately before the Great Leap Forward. Often, these agricultural quotas were so high that they left rural Chinese communities with little to no grain for themselves after procurement:
Each policy region was assigned a specific grain yield target that was far above its normal yield. More specifically, the counties on the north of the Yellow River (Region 1) were required to achieve 400 catties per mu, even though the regular yield in this region was only about 153 catties per mu. The target for counties south of the Yellow River and north of the Huai River (Region 2) was 500 catties per mu, and for counties south of the Huai River (Region 3) it was 800 catties per mu, even though the normal grain yields for Regions 2 and 3 were only about 145 and 269 catties per mu, respectively.”4Chang Liu and Li-An Zhou, “Radical Target Setting and China’s Great Famine:” 2, accessed December 20, 2020, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3075015.
Because of the culture of fear that permeated the Chinese Communist Party, these nonsensical quantities of grain remained in place wholly unchecked. For instance, despite grain output falling significantly between the years 1959 and 1960, the grain procurement quota remained at its previous fixed rate, which “caused excessive procurement and mortality rates, especially for those agriculture-productive regions.”5Liu and Zhou, “Radical Target Setting,” 3. Without any system of checks and balances, the fallout of the CCP’s failures to reasonably procure grain landed on the backs of rural peasants.
An effective communist society collects and equitably allocates foodstuffs to all citizens per individual needs; however, the Chinese Comunist Party’s intentions when procuring grain were not so pure. The CCP’s incentive to collect large quantities of grain from the People’s Communes stemmed from the Great Leap Forward’s focus on steel production and industrialization: “Grain was essential to meet the demand for raw materials from the industrial sector and to feed rapidly growing numbers of urban residents and factory workers. Therefore, pursuing high grain yields emerged as a top priority of Mao’s agenda to achieve large-scale industrialization.”6Liu and Zhou, “Radical Target Setting,” 6. To Mao, the industrialization of China superseded the wellbeing of its citizens; he was willing to sacrifice the lives of tens of millions of Chinese people in order to industrialize China and establish communism. Grain quotas were just one avenue through which Mao planned to accomplish this goal.
As much as Mao himself was a product of the totalitarian system, so too were the extreme grain targets. Excessive goals for industrialization forced Mao to set absurd grain quotas; the totalitarian government suppressed all reasonable criticism of these targets; and without anything to stop those quotas, millions of peasants were left with insufficient stores of food. The Chinese Communist Party’s push for industrialization was an unstoppable force; not even the lives of 36 million Chinese people could serve as a roadblock.