Assessing China's Great Leap Forward
Catastrophic Misjudgement or Crime Against Humanity?
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Welcome to the fifth instalment of my eight-week deep dive into China as a modern civilization-state. This deep dive guides you through one leading scholarly history—Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping—as part of my World History World Tour 2025.
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The fifth instalment looks at the modern China’s socialist transformation as a People’s Republic from 1949 to 1960, under the leadership of Mao Zedong. This period ended in the Great Leap Forward, famine and a legitimacy crisis that set the scene for the 1960s Cultural Revolution. The Great Leap Forward is the focus of this week’s deep dive.
These events—the Great Leap Forward and the related Chinese famine of the late 1950s—are hotly disputed by commentators on world politics today. These tragedies have unfortunately been enlisted into the memory struggle sessions of the Second Cold War. On the one hand, as Mühlhahn writes in Making China Modern:
“In recent literature it has become commonplace to compare the Great Leap Forward to other forms of mass murder in the twentieth century—above all, with the Holocaust or the liquidation of the kulaks in the Soviet Union.”
(Mühlhahn, Making China Modern p. 447)
Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 is sometimes presented as such a case that Mao’s Great Leap Forward was a Great Crime Against Humanity. On the other hand, some popular and niche commentators on China claim there was no famine, no catastrophe, and that China in fact achieved great leaps forward in industrial development. Examples include SL Kanthan, Shanghai Panda, Carl Zha and Godfree Roberts. They claim that the failures of the Great Leap Forward are fundamentally fabrications of Western atrocity propaganda.
Mühlhahn’s balanced judgement is that twenty-seven to thirty million people died because of the Great Leap Forward, but that it was not intentional mass murder. He makes a disciplined assessment of this event that stretches our capacity for empathetic engagement. When confronted with such disaster, we tend to look away, or to turn to fables of good and evil. A common human fault is exposed when Dikötter indicts Mao or when Mao fans erase the victims of the Great Leap Forward from collective memory. We cannot bear too much historical reality.
This weakness prompted Inga Clendinnen to argue in Reading the Holocaust for the necessity of history.
“Historians take the large liberty of speaking for the dead, but we take this liberty under the rule of the discipline, and the rule is strict. There are many who would use the images of the Holocaust for their own purposes, some sinister, some trivial, all deforming. If the people of the past are to be given a life beyond their own, beyond the vagaries of fashion and of political exploitation… historians must retrieve and represent the actualities of past experience in accordance with our rule, with patience, scepticism and curiosity, and with whatever art we can muster—provided always that the art remains subject to our rule.”
Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, pp. 204-205
I think Mühlhahn’s treatment of the Great Leap Forward fulfils this obligation, whereas other popular commentators fail Clendinnen’s scrupulous ethical standard.
How to make sense of China’s two great mid-century traumas—the Great Leap Forward and the Chinese Cultural Revolution—while being casual readers of history, not professional scholars? That is the focus of my deep dives this week and next.
Below the paywall is my distillation of how China leapt forward to disaster, based on Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping.
You may also want to check back on my earlier posts on Inga Clendinnen and Reading the Holocaust.
How to face monstrous world events and not turn your heart into stone
Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (reading of first chapter with commentary)
Inga Clendinnen, Representing the Holocaust (reading of final chapter with commentary)
And as a quick recap—especially for new subscribers—the deep dives of the China World History Tour so far have been:
How Modern China began in Qing Institutions (1644-1800)
Opium, Gunboats, Rebellions and Unequal Treaties: How Modern China Was Forged (1800-1900)
Upending the Empire and Rebuilding the Republic (1900-1930)
Please read on.