Tragedy of the Great Leap Forward

Was the Great Leap Forward (大跃进) to be blamed for having planted the seeds of false reporting within the Chinese bureaucracy?

During the Leap, the People's Daily (人民日报) proclaimed double, then triple, then ten times the amount of food that was grown.

According to Jasper Becker, propaganda photos showed wheat stems growing so close together that children could sit on top of them, pumpkins the size of cars, and miracle rice plants that produced three ears rather than one.

In a frenzy of hysterical adulation, Party officials throughout the country outbid each other in reporting the size of the harvest. Those who dared to raise doubts found themselves at best detained, or at worse beaten to death in struggle sessions.

Mao Zedong (毛泽东) apparently believed the wildly exaggerated reportings. When the quotas were later not met, he concluded that selfish peasants were hoarding their grain. Squads of officials were then dispatched to find the peasants' hidden cache. When nothing was found, officials seized clothes, jewellery, livestock, wood, furniture, or anything they could get their hands on.

As Becker wrote: "In imperial times, the state had always required peasants to hand over part of their harvest - perhaps 15 or 20 per cent. In return the local magistrate was obliged to maintain granaries so that the population could be fed in times of natural disaster. Now, under Mao, the state took everything but gave nothing in return."

In his memoirs, a deputy Party secretary recalled that peasants had preferred to die rather than rob the granaries. He wrote: "It proves how obedient our people are, how much they observe the law, how much trust they gave to the Party, and how great is the guilt which some of our leading cadres should bear toward such people!"

Was it merely obedience and law-abiding on the part of peasants? Or ignorance and fear of the law/tyrants.

By the time the peasants realized that they would not be helped, it was too late. Most, already weak from hunger, possessed nothing at all, neither food nor money, and often not even their own work tools.

Separately, during the height of the famine, Chinese leader Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇) reportedly returned to his hometown to see for himself how bad the situation was.

But even then, officials did their best to conceal the truth. A caretaker recounted that trees were even plastered with mud and painted, so that Liu would not realize that starving peasants had stripped them of all their bark.