Current Events > Which is morally worse? The Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution

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The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) was Mao's plan to bring China into the industrial era through communism. People were moved to communes where daily life was regulated for everyone (basically adults worked all day and family life was abolished). The people - who were used to an agrarian lifestyle - were called to produce steel, which they did by throwing everything metal they had into a furnace and smelting it. But the "steel" was useless.

They were also told to produce grain, and soon communes were trying to outdo each other by reporting bigger totals of produced grain. They would even report false totals to look good, and the government would ask for even more impossible totals. The government took more than the communes had.

By 1959 the government realized that the Great Leap Forward was a disaster, but when one on the officials directly questioned Mao about the Great Leap Forward, Mao got mad and the government didn't cut the grain totals. This caused the Great Chinese Famine and 30-50+ million people died. Finally by 1962 more moderate Communists had taken control over Mao and the Great Leap Forward was ended.

The Cultural Revolution (1966 - Mao's death in 1976) was basically Mao's attempt to gain influence again after the failure of the Great Leap Forward by removing any sign of capitalism from China. He claimed that bourgeois ideas had taken over society and the government, and the only way to fix this was through class revolution.

Students were mobilized into the Red Guard, which was basically Mao's personal army of student radicals that would enforce his policies on the streets. At school the students learned Mao's propaganda.

Many groups of people were targeted, such as landlords, capitalists, teachers,intellectuals (including teachers), but anyone could be suspected of questioning the government at any time and would be reprimanded. Many historical buildings and artifacts were destroyed because they were reminiscent of non-communist China.

2-7 million people were killed or died as a result of the Cultural Revolution, but many more were publicly humiliated, imprisoned, assaulted, and tortured.
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Damn_Underscore posted...

The Cultural Revolution (1966 - Mao's death in 1976) was basically Mao's attempt to gain influence again after the failure of the Great Leap Forward by removing any sign of capitalism from China. He claimed that bourgeois ideas had taken over society and the government, and the only way to fix this was through class revolution.

cant wait til we get this in the US

no no, its not shit policy...its capitalism!

bump

I'm sorry I had to make the first post so long, but I think most people don't know much about these events unfortunately.
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Mao was a fucking moron whose Cult of Personality resulted in the deaths of millions and set back China for decades.
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Mao was smart, he was just an evil communist.
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The Great Leap Forward. Bunch of people died, and the steel thing was pretty stupid.
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Damn_Underscore posted...

Mao was smart, he was just an evil communist.

didnt he cause a famine in china by telling everyone to kill all the sparrows, because he didnt know that they ate bugs lol
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Great Leap Forward, easily. Isn't that where they tried "deep farming" (planting seeds multiple feet in the ground) and "communist agriculture" (plant things too close together so they can "share resources") that was the primary driving force behind their massive famine?
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Great Leap Forward

Though I will add that despite the lower body count, the Cultural Revolution is more repulsive to me
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Yeah say what you will about Stalin's five year plans but they at least accomplished the goal of modernizing the Soviet Union. The great leap forward a disaster on all levels.
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s0nicfan posted...

Great Leap Forward, easily. Isn't that where they tried "deep farming" (planting seeds multiple feet in the ground) and "communist agriculture" (plant things too close together so they can "share resources") that was the primary driving force behind their massive famine?

Yes, but those things (and the idea that they could grow more by doing them) just led to inflated numbers, which led to the government taking more than the people had,which led to the famine.
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Doom_Art posted...

Great Leap Forward

Though I will add that despite the lower body count, the Cultural Revolution is more repulsive to me

That's why I said morally worse, I think you should have voted for the CR.

The GLF is a more devastating event in human history, but not necessarily morally worse. Even though it was continued because of Mao's selfishness, it started with good intentions. Of course you could say that communism is morally wrong to begin with. The GLF also indirectly killed all those people. It was a major reason for the Great Chinese Famine (along with drought and poor weather), the famine is what actually killed them.

On the other hand, the CR was started because of Mao's selfishness.
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ScazarMeltex posted...

Yeah say what you will about Stalin's five year plans but they at least accomplished the goal of modernizing the Soviet Union. The great leap forward a disaster on all levels.

Yeah definitely worked out as a long term plan for the soviet union...maybe for the russian people as whole since they still get the benefits, but I feel like modernization would have happened sans Stalin's lovely philosophies

The sheer loss of life he caused is so staggering... It's hard to even grasp the idea of 1M people dying let alone 30-50. What a damn monster.
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Damn_Underscore posted...

s0nicfan posted...

Great Leap Forward, easily. Isn't that where they tried "deep farming" (planting seeds multiple feet in the ground) and "communist agriculture" (plant things too close together so they can "share resources") that was the primary driving force behind their massive famine?

Yes, but those things (and the idea that they could grow more by doing them) just led to inflated numbers, which led to the government taking more than the people had,which led to the famine.

This is one of the more dangerous aspects of a centrally planned economy dominated by threat of violence.

There's no mechanism for improvement because no one wants to admit they failed....so if they can fudge the numbers they will.

depends on whether you measure evil by outcome or intent

the cultural revolution killed less people, but it was meant to kill people
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Romes187 posted...

ScazarMeltex posted...

Yeah say what you will about Stalin's five year plans but they at least accomplished the goal of modernizing the Soviet Union. The great leap forward a disaster on all levels.

Yeah definitely worked out as a long term plan for the soviet union...maybe for the russian people as whole since they still get the benefits, but I feel like modernization would have happened sans Stalin's lovely philosophies

Likely yes, its hard to say. Certainly not under the tsar's governance. Under Lenin or Trotsky it probably would have taken longer. I think Stalin had a better read on the situation than the other two did, the Soviet Union had to get close to the level of industrialization that the rest of Europe was at and it had to do it quickly.

Imagine a still technologically backwards Soviet Union in the face of Operation Barbarossa. It's likely the Germans win the war and the rest of our life's look fundamentally different.

So much of the 20th century hangs on a really weird balance.
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Darkman124 posted...

depends on whether you measure evil by outcome or intent

the cultural revolution killed less people, but it was meant to kill people

Yeah, that's why I asked that question.

Also I wanted to discuss these two events which I personally never heard about in school.
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Damn_Underscore posted...

Darkman124 posted...

depends on whether you measure evil by outcome or intent

the cultural revolution killed less people, but it was meant to kill people

Yeah, that's why I asked that question.

Also I wanted to discuss these two events which I personally never heard about in school.

the 1994 taiwannese film, To Live, provides a useful contextualization of each event.

fwiw, I voted Cultural Revolution, since your question was about morality, and not net human impact. The Great Leap Forward definitely caused more human suffering.
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MC_BatCommander posted...

The sheer loss of life he caused is so staggering... It's hard to even grasp the idea of 1M people dying let alone 30-50. What a damn monster.

Imagine between half a million and one million people murdered in just 100 days. That was the genocide in Rwanda in April-July 1994.

Coffeebeanz posted...

Mao was a fucking moron whose Cult of Personality resulted in the deaths of millions and set back China for decades.

I was in Beijing once in the square where his body is kept. we saw the mausoleum but didn't go inside. I probably would have had the urge to spit on his corpse if I gone in. fuck Mao.

Darkman124 posted...

Damn_Underscore posted...

Darkman124 posted...

depends on whether you measure evil by outcome or intent

the cultural revolution killed less people, but it was meant to kill people

Yeah, that's why I asked that question.

Also I wanted to discuss these two events which I personally never heard about in school.

the 1994 taiwannese film, To Live, provides a useful contextualization of each event.

fwiw, I voted Cultural Revolution, since your question was about morality, and not net human impact. The Great Leap Forward definitely caused more human suffering.

I voted the Cultural Revolution too, for this reason. If you're making moral judgments, then intent matters quite a bit. Particularly, the Great Leap Forward was partly modeled off of Stalin's Five-Year Plans, the sheer brutality of which was not nearly as well appreciated at the time(and likely would have been dismissed by the CCP as Western propaganda, in any case). What made the Great Leap Forward so disastrous was profound ignorance, a lack of communication/trust and stubbornness. It wasn't malicious in any way, whereas the Cultural Revolution was essentially Mao's way of muscling out and punishing everyone who had (in his mind) slighted him and cut him out of the loop(mostly as a result of the Great Leap Forward). It was 100% malicious in intent.

Damn_Underscore posted...

Mao was smart, he was just an evil communist.

No. He was a total manchild who is basically the embodiment of Dunning-Kruger "My Stupid"
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His solution to literally anything was third grade logic. Too many birds? Kill them all and see what happens. Not enough rice? Plant it literally everywhere. Too many people? Ban more kids.

His agricultural policies devastated China for decades because there was literally no logic to them whatsoever. Nobody was willing to stand up and say they were idiotic, because Mao convinced everyone that anyone college educated was a capitalist bourgeois. So you had the blind leading the blind.
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When people keep talking about Hitler while ignoring Mao, Stalin, etc., they appear to be saying that the white people murdered by Hitler matter more than the non-white people murdered by commies. Thats just wrong.
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One of the craziest things Mao did was declare all doctors "bourgeoise" and most of them were executed via mob justice. The very few that remained were totally unable to treat such a large population, but instead of admitting his policy fucked everyone over, he blamed the remaining doctors for "not working hard enough" so a lot of them were sent to prison or concentration camps. Then China's healthcare system fell apart at the seams, so he sort-of "unbanned" traditional medicine, which didn't help at all, but he forced journals to publish fake studies showing superiority to modern medicine. That fucked up China's health care so badly that even to this day, the Chinese tend not to trust Doctors and consider it a somewhat "dirty" peasant job.
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Mao understood people and how to control and manipulate them. He also understood how to fight a guerilla war against a numerically and materially superior enemy. Neither of those things translate into how to run a succesful government or country.
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ScazarMeltex posted...

Mao understood people and how to control and manipulate them. He also understood how to fight a guerilla war against a numerically and materially superior enemy. Neither of those things translate into how to run a succesful government or country.

Yeah. He let the Republic of China fight Japan in WWII and then swooped in while they were devastated, and also inexplicably took the credit.
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Coffeebeanz posted...

ScazarMeltex posted...

Mao understood people and how to control and manipulate them. He also understood how to fight a guerilla war against a numerically and materially superior enemy. Neither of those things translate into how to run a succesful government or country.

Yeah. He let the Republic of China fight Japan in WWII and then swooped in while they were devastated, and also inexplicably took the credit.

Eh, the Chinese Civil War was Kai-shek's to lose. And he lost in a big way.

Only relevant gain the PLA had from WWII was Manchuria per Zhukov's success in August Storm. Nationalists outnumbered PLA forces 3:1.
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Because Jiang Jie Shi's ROC army had been devastated by years of fighting Japan while Mao sat back and read comic books (literally)
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Coffeebeanz posted...

Because Jiang Jie Shi's ROC army had been devastated by years of fighting Japan while Mao sat back and read comic books (literally)

the army was 3x larger and better equipped, recipient of billions in US aid. PLA had a bit of USSR support, but minimal, mostly territory/long-term investments like the coal producing regions of manchuria

the problem was Jie Shi (Kai-shek to most US readers)'s plans were to fight a defensive war. after a decade of fighting one I kinda get it, but that wasn't the war he was in. he spread his forces out and did not seize initiative.
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Darkman124 posted...

depends on whether you measure evil by outcome or intent

the cultural revolution killed less people, but it was meant to kill people

So, you're saying communists are so incompetent that they kill more people without meaning to than when they're deliberately trying to?

No, I'm not being totally serious with that remark.
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tbh yeah kinda

early PRC govt planners were not good at their jobs
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