What was the name of the economic plan that the chinese government developed in order to boost China’s economy?

Describe the Great Leap Forward. Include communes and rations.

What three problems caused the Great Leap Forward to fail within a year?

What was the biggest consequence of the Great Leap Forward?

What was the cultural revolution?

What was the true purpose of the Cultural Revolution?

Who was the Red Guard and what did they do?

What was the impact of the Cultural Revolution on many Chinese?

In 1989, where did many Chinese students come together to peacefully protest communism?

What happened here when the government got involved?

What was the international response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre?

Great Leap Forward, in Chinese history, the campaign undertaken by the Chinese communists between 1958 and early 1960 to organize its vast population, especially in large-scale rural communes, to meet China’s industrial and agricultural problems. The Chinese hoped to develop labour-intensive methods of industrialization, which would emphasize manpower rather than machines and capital expenditure. Thereby, it was hoped, the country could bypass the slow, more typical process of industrialization through gradual accumulation of capital and purchase of heavy machinery. The Great Leap Forward approach was epitomized by the development of small backyard steel furnaces in every village and urban neighbourhood, which were intended to accelerate the industrialization process.

The promulgation of the Great Leap Forward was the result of the failure of the Soviet model of industrialization in China. The Soviet model, which emphasized the conversion of capital gained from the sale of agricultural products into heavy machinery, was inapplicable in China because, unlike the Soviet Union, it had a very dense population and no large agricultural surplus with which to accumulate capital. After intense debate, it was decided that agriculture and industry could be developed at the same time by changing people’s working habits and relying on labour rather than machine-centred industrial processes. An experimental commune was established in the north-central province of Henan early in 1958, and the system soon spread throughout the country.

Under the commune system, agricultural and political decisions were