Father of Chinese Communism: Chairman Mao Zedong {Part 5: The Great Leap Forward}

The story continues in our biography of Chairman Mao Zedong delivered to you in a series of posts on your one-stop blog for informative biographies. You can check out the previous post by clicking here.

Mao believed that the collapse in the Food cycle was not as a result of his brutal policies, rather he amazed everyone by accusing the birds in the nation of being too much. He said the birds were eating a cconsiderable ration of the Chinese people’s grains and causing a shortage in the supply of food to the populace. He went ahead to issue a dicta that the Chinese people were to eradicate every last sparrow. It was called the “War on Sparrows” as the birds were hunted down for days and weeks. The birds were then gathered in their thousands and paraded as an accomplishment since every village wanted to show their own contribution towards food production.

A village's contribution to the war waged against Sparrows in China under Mao's rule

Mao’s move on the birds is badly miscalculated. The following year recorded blights on majority of the crops cultivated since there were no birds to feed on the insects, caterpillars and the locust who simply replaced the birds in feeding on the plants anyway. The result was a full-blown famine across the nation, as China under Mao had only moved from bad to worse. Mao was in total control of what happened in industrialized cities such as Beijing and he used the Communist Party propaganda machine to portray his Great Leap Forward agenda as a dazzling success. Very few people knew the reality of the famine that was taking over the countryside of China.

A starved Chinese under Mao's Regime

Mao consistently received reports on his desk and was well aware of the death in millions of his people but he saw this simply as a price worth paying for him to achieve his goals. Eventually, by the spring of 1959 the truth had started to leak out as a body count of 40 million dead people could not be swept under the carpet. Regardless, Mao ignored this and continued to extend and push his Great Leap Forward even further. Top communist party memebers could only murmur about the situation of the Chinese nation under Mao’s regime. He certainly had no opposition to challenge his policies and everyone simply played along and danced to the false tune of a sweet utopian China.

Liu Shaoqi in the center right next to Mao

However, behind the scene, Mao’s Head of State Liu Shaoqi was in full denial of the large scale of starvation across the nation. He decided to step up and challenge the Supreme Leader with extreme bravery in July 1959 at a Communist Party Conference which Mao had organized to discuss the expansion of his Great Leap Forward plans. Mao took the issue raised as an attack on his perfect vision of his grand plan: “The Great Leap Forward”. He felt betrayed by one of his right hand men, got furious and at the same time was worried that people like his second-in-command would destroy his legacy. Mao’s hands were tied as he could not take revenge immediately. He knew Liu Shaoqi was a popular man in the party as well and Mao decided to keep him in power for the administrative functions he handled. Instead, Mao would take revenge with a nationwide decade-long master plan in which Liu Shaoqi would be publicly humiliated.

Be on the lookout for the continuation of our series on Chairman Mao Zedong's biography in the next post on this very blog.

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AS COMPOSED BY QUE