Great Leap Forward
1958–1962 Chinese socioeconomic campaign
The Great Leap Forward was an industrialization campaign within China from 1958 to 1962, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to transform the country from an agrarian society into an industrialized society through the formation of people's communes. The Great Leap Forward led to between 15 and 55 million deaths in mainland China during the 1959–1961 Great Chinese Famine it caused, making it the largest or second-largest famine in human history.
The Great Leap Forward grew out of Mao's push for rapid development through mass mobilization and a reaction against the Soviet development strategy. Anti-intellectual politics and the surge of less-educated radicals helped sideline technical constraints and dissent. The strategy relied on mobilizing peasants to sustain themselves while supplying grain, cash crops, and even steel for urban industry, without major new state investment. Famine worsened when procurement quotas were set using false reports from the countryside. After the 1959 Lushan Conference, anti-"rightist" campaigns intensified misreporting and coercive collection even as output fell, deepening rural famine.
In rural China, the campaign expanded mandatory collectivization and banned private farming; those who resisted were punished as "counterrevolutionaries". Authorities enforced restrictions through public struggle sessions, social pressure, and forced labor.
The public source identifies “Great Leap Forward” as 1958–1962 Chinese socioeconomic campaign. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Great, Leap and Forward.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q58715. The Library of Congress control number is sh2019000428. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1962, 1959 and 1961.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great Leap Forward” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.