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Mao's Crusade: Politics and Policy Implementation in China's Great Leap Forward. By Alfred L. Chan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. XIII + 321 pp. Index, bibliography, tables. Cloth, $65.00. ISBN 0-199-24406-5.
The Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign from 1958 to 1960 presents a watershed in the history of post-1949 China. Its catastrophic economic effects and resulting political cleavages among the Chinese leadership indirectly led to the outbreak of the second major political upheaval, the Cultural Revolution, in 1966. Departing from the First Five-Year plan, based on the centralized Soviet economic model, the Chinese government used the GLF to introduce economic development and social progress at high speed by mobilizing the entire Chinese population. Most famous for drastic collectivization measures, production of inferior, useless steel in primitive backyard furnaces, and deception of the public through propaganda, the disastrous policies of the GLF brought famine and economic devastation to China, in particular the countryside. It took the economy several years to recover from this "great leap backward" and to return to the 1958 level of agricultural output.
Despite its enormous impact on the trajectory of postwar Chinese politics and history, until a decade ago the GLF attracted less attention in the literature than the Cultural Revolution. In recent years, the GLF-its political and economic crises, its agents, and its victims-has been explored by political scientists, sociologists, historians, and economists in a considerable number of studies. As a political scientist, Alfred L. Chan approaches the topic of the GLF with general questions about Mao's role...