GREAT LEAP FORWARD

Why did Mao launch the 'Great Leap Forward' and what were its consequences?

Why did Mao launch the 'Great Leap Forward' and what were its consequences?

Introduction

When Mao Zedong began the ill-fated Great Leap Forward in 1958, his goal was to boost Chinese industrial production by mobilizing the peasants. Between 1958 and 1962, the resulting shifts of human resources from agriculture to industry helped lead to a famine that killed as many as 30 million people. While the human tragedy is well known, the Great Leap's legacy of environmental degradation is only now being recognized. In a misguided effort at land-use planning, lakes were filled in to create more fields for farming, eliminating a natural means of flood control. State policy also called for crops to be grown on grasslands ill-suited for cultivation; within a few years, many of the grasslands had turned to desert. Across China, a million small-scale iron-smelting furnaces were built. Huge areas of forest were cut down to provide fuel for the inefficient furnaces, destroying a valuable natural resource and causing widespread soil erosion and desertification.

Thesis Statement

Mao launch Great Leap Forward is to boost Chinese industrial production by mobilizing the peasants

Discussion

Environmental degradation did not end with the Great Leap Forward. Deng Xiaoping's reforms have led to tremendous economic growth and a corresponding increase in energy demand. The energy gap is being filled by the burning of fossil fuels, causing a domestic and international environmental crisis. China, with its growing population and heavy reliance on coal, will soon be emitting more carbon dioxide than any other country. Many scientists predict that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, expected sometime in the next century at current rates of emission, would cause the average global temperature to rise by three to eight degrees Fahrenheit, disrupting the global climate system with largely unpredictable but possibly catastrophic consequences.

China's energy consumption lies at the heart of both its domestic environmental concerns--such as deforestation, desertification, and water and air pollution--and the international global warming problem. China's behavior in both areas seems to indicate that economic growth will continue to be the main concern of its energy policy, leaving environmental protection in doubt. China's Agenda 21, its plan to combat global climate change, argues that China should take "the path of relatively rapid economic growth and gradual improvements in the quality of development."

But China's leadership is not blind to environmental hazards. Even Deng Xiaoping's daughter, Deng Nan, Senior Vice-Minister of China's State Science and Technology Council (SSTC), has remarked that "if environmental problems are ignored in the process of development, economic development will be seriously hampered." Unless China embarks on a new energy strategy and finds ways to accommodate international environmental concerns, its fast-growing economy could destroy its environment and overwhelm international efforts to control global warming.

The Chinese government is quite concerned about severe local and regional environmental problems. With well over one billion inhabitants, China must support one quarter of the world's population on only seven percent of the world's ...