In 1958, Mao started his second five-year plan.
It was called the Great Leap Forward to the future.
One goal of the plan was a forced collectivization.
Private plots were abolished and private production banned.
Peasants were herded into communes,
their implements were confiscated and collectivized.
The traditional peasant activities,
simple activities such as funerals or weddings or personal celebrations were banned.
To maximize agricultural production,
the local party authorities made peasants work impossibly long hours.
Sometimes they had to work through the night.
This was achieved by threats,
beatings, humiliation, and torture.
Some peasants were killed,
other sent to labor camps.
Local officials also sent inflated harvest figures to Beijing.
This meant that communes had to supply
that much grain and it meant that there was nothing left for the peasants to eat.
The communes were organized on a collective basis.
People even had to eat together let alone work.
Everything, everything had to be done collectively.
The other prong of the Great Leap Forward was industrialization.
First of all, a dramatic increase in steel production.
Mao, whose economic knowledge was even
poorer than that of Stalin believed that steel was the key to development.
His aim was to surpass the steel output of the United Kingdom in 15 years.
Thousands of plants were started in the first three years of the plan.
In just three years,
the urban population increased by more than 30%.
These are some of the plants but this achievement was not enough.
Mao encouraged the construction of small furnaces in every commune and every urban area.
These furnaces were to produce steel out of scrap metal.
So that meant that on top of their agricultural work peasants were
now working at the backyard furnaces producing steel.
The urban population irrespective of their professions, be it engineer,
doctor or teacher they all were busy doing the same.
They were making steel the output was
inevitably a negligible amount of very low quality steal.
Yet another part of the plan was the construction of irrigation system.
The irrigation works were poorly prepared and the dams were very poorly constructed.
This led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Necessarily this resulted in the great famine.
The country's economy was wrecked.
The agriculture was ruined.
According to different estimates
the Great Leap Forward cost China 30-50 million lives.
Throughout the famine,
the Chinese government continue to export grain and refuse any foreign assistance.
This man-made famine was the greatest in history far
surpassing even Stalin's great famine of 1932, '33.
Look at the right picture here.
This is a child collecting grass for his supper.
The Great Leap Forward was followed by the Cultural Revolution which started in 1966.
It was formally aimed at preserving and strengthening true communist ideals and ideology.
But of course, it was needed to blame somebody for
the difficulties which were the result of the Great Leap Forward.
So Mao blamed them on the remnants of capitalism and traditionalism,
in other words on the older generation of leaders.
The removal of revisionists through violent class struggle
was the core of the Cultural Revolution.
Cultural Revolution was a massive purge,
it strengthened Mao's cult.
Millions were persecuted, humiliated, tortured,
imprisoned, sent to hard labor, executed.
About a million people perished.
It was an economic and social disaster.
Ironically, one of the people who suffered was Deng Xiaoping,
later he became the author of the Chinese economic miracle.
China's attempt to fast track to socialism was of course,
unique to that country.
Yet its similarity with Stalin's revolution from above was obvious.
Mao did not copy the details of Stalin's Great Leap Forward but
the basic principles underlying both were the same and so were the results.
The great lure of Stalinism was the idea of shortcutting history.
So as to achieve success for industrialization
through nationalization and forced national effort.
Not one of such attempts succeeded yet there are still many willing to try this route.