Surpass Britain in Fifteen Years: Flowers, the Leap, and the Split, 1956–1962

Central interpretation

Between 1956 and 1962 Mao Zedong tried to speed up history, and each attempt narrowed the room for anyone to tell him he was wrong. The Hundred Flowers invitation of 1956–1957 ended in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which silenced the intellectuals, economists and engineers who might have warned against the Great Leap Forward. The Leap itself, launched in 1958 with communes, mess halls and backyard furnaces, rested on false reports that no cadre dared contradict, and when Peng Dehuai did so at Lushan in 1959, Mao purged him and pressed on. The result was the worst famine in recorded history, with on the order of 30 million excess deaths. At the same time the alliance with Moscow fell apart, over ideology, security and pride, leaving China alone between two superpowers, building its own bomb and hiding its industry in the mountains. The household registration system, hardened in the same years, divided the country into city and village for a generation.

How to use this essay

This essay is the background behind the deck Surpass Britain in Fifteen Years (FA26), the second of the three Chapter 27 lectures. Like Lecture 1, the deck is built for online independent study: the Open Study Buddy button (or the N key) shows each slide's Study Buddy notes on the slide, and each segment ends with an ungraded click-to-reveal self-check before its Review Question. Slide letters refer to the permanent IDs in the lower-left corner of the deck. The slides teach the corrected history wherever Ebrey's details on pp. 479–483 need it; the student notes do not flag the discrepancies, and this essay's last section lists every one, with its source. There is no primary-source reading for this chapter. One slide (g) uses an AI-generated illustration, approved 2026-10-27; every other image is a real photograph or poster.

Part I: A Hundred Flowers (Review Question 6)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 479–480. Reading-guide sentence (p. 480): "By the end..."

Why Mao invited criticism

Slide e sets up the segment with a concept: by 1956 intellectuals had already been through thought reform, the study sessions and self-criticisms of 1951–1952, and the campaign against Hu Feng in 1955. They had good reason to hesitate when invited to speak. Slide f gives the trigger Ebrey names, de-Stalinization. Khrushchev's secret speech of February 1956 and the Hungarian rising that autumn convinced Mao that a ruling party cut off from the people could be overthrown, and that open criticism might work as a safety valve. Roderick MacFarquhar's first volume of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution remains the fullest account of the leadership's debates, including the doubts of Liu Shaoqi and others about inviting criticism at all.¹ The names box introduces Khrushchev, Deng Xiaoping (general secretary from the Eighth Congress of 1956) and Peng Dehuai, so that all three are familiar before they matter.

The spring of 1957 and the crackdown

Slide g quotes the Qinghua University wall poster that Ebrey cites (p. 480). Because the surviving poster photographs show only Chinese text, the picture is an AI-generated illustration of students reading wall posters, captioned on the slide and listed on the sources slide as an interpretation, not a historical source; its poster characters are invented and not real writing. Benton and Hunter's Wild Lily, Prairie Fire collects translations of the posters and speeches of May 1957, including those of Peking University's "Democracy Wall."² Slide h turns to the Anti-Rightist Campaign of June 1957, run by Deng, with its 5 percent quotas. The duo shows Luo Longji and Zhang Bojun, the Democratic League leaders who became the campaign's most famous targets and were never rehabilitated. Yen-lin Chung's study of the campaign's organization shows how the quota system and the party's own "activists" drove the numbers up.³ On the size of the campaign, the slide gives the official count and says historians think the real number was higher; the notes explain why the textbook's figure is larger (see the last section).

Part II: The Leap and the Famine (Review Question 7)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 480–482. Reading-guide sentence (p. 482): "Mao's faulty economics..."

From a promise to a campaign

Slide l dates Mao's promise to surpass Britain to the Moscow conference of November 1957, where he answered Khrushchev's boast about overtaking the United States, and dates the formal launch to the second session of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958. The photograph is of that Moscow conference. The slide's third beat makes the connection on which this lecture turns: the experts who might have objected had just been labeled rightists. Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine is the most detailed archival narrative of what followed, though its tone and its higher death estimate are debated.⁴

Slides m and n follow Ebrey's account of the communes and the furnaces. By the end of 1958 some 740,000 collectives had been merged into about 26,000 communes, averaging around 5,000 households each; the free mess halls, which the second photograph shows, encouraged people to eat their fill in the autumn of 1958 and left nothing for the spring. The steel target for 1958 was doubled to 10.7 million tons, which drove the backyard furnace campaign; most of the iron produced was too brittle to use. Slide o explains the "launching satellites" competition in which cadres reported ever larger harvests, and the 1958 poster gives students the propaganda image of impossible abundance.

Lushan and the famine

Slide p tells the Lushan conference of July–August 1959 through Peng Dehuai's letter and Mao's counterattack. Li Rui, Mao's secretary at the conference and later himself purged, wrote the classic insider account.⁵ The hall photograph is a modern one (CC BY-SA); no photograph of the meeting in session is available under a free license. The point for students is that the conference turned a retreat that had already begun in late 1958 into a renewed radicalization, and that the second wave of procurement in 1959–1960 did most of the killing. Slide q has no photograph by design. Its chart uses Ebrey's grain figures (200, 170 and 144 million tons), and its statistic is her "on the order of 30 million" excess deaths. Yang Jisheng's Tombstone, by a Xinhua journalist whose father starved in Hubei, is the most important Chinese account.⁶ The kicker dates the famine to 1959–1961, the years of highest mortality; the retreat of 1960–1962 is in the third beat.

Part III: Breaking with Moscow (Review Question 9)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 483. Reading-guide sentence (p. 483): "In July 1960..."

Slide u gathers the early quarrels: Mao's disdain for Khrushchev after the secret speech, the shelling of Jinmen (Quemoy) in August 1958, Khrushchev's view of the communes, Mao's remarks on nuclear war, the cancelled promise of a sample bomb in June 1959, and Moscow's neutrality in the Sino-Indian border dispute. Lorenz Lüthi's The Sino-Soviet Split, built on archives from both sides and from Eastern Europe, argues that ideology, not only national interest, drove the split, and the slide's three kinds of cause (ideas, security, pride) follow his framing.⁷ Slide v uses the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, opened in October 1957 with Soviet design help, to make the withdrawal of July 1960 concrete: about 1,400 Soviet experts left within weeks, taking their blueprints and cancelling some 250 projects. Shen Zhihua's history, by China's leading historian of Sino-Soviet relations, supplies the figures.⁸

Slide w follows the polemics of 1960–1964, the "revisionist" label and the split of communist parties worldwide, and adds the one-line correction on Vietnam (see the last section).⁹ Slide x tells the story of the bomb: project 596, named for the month of the Soviet refusal (June 1959), and the test at Lop Nur on 16 October 1964. The second photograph shows Zhou Enlai announcing the test to the cast of The East Is Red.¹⁰ Slide aa looks ahead to the Cultural Revolution through the photograph of Liu Shaoqi, Mao and Edgar Snow in October 1960; for now its link points to the SU26 Lecture 3 deck.

Pierian Spring: City and Village, Counting, and the Third Front (Review Question 8)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 483 (Q8: "These residence policies...").

Slides cc and dd teach household registration. The State Council directive of June 1955 set up registration everywhere, and the Regulations on Household Registration adopted on 9 January 1958 made the urban–rural line law, with status inherited through the mother. When the Leap's industrial expansion was reversed, about 20 million people who had moved to the cities were sent back in 1961–1963. Cheng and Selden's article remains the standard account of the system's origins, and Jeremy Brown's City Versus Countryside in Mao's China shows how the divide was lived, negotiated and resented.¹¹¹² Slide cc uses a 1957 photograph of officials being sent to the countryside; slide dd uses the Caoyang New Village workers' housing in Shanghai, which stands for what an urban hukou brought.

Slide gg explains how the famine's toll is reconstructed and reproduces Ebrey's province table (from MacFarquhar, vol. 3). The range given to students, about 15 to 45 million, spans the published estimates: Jiang Zhenghua (about 17 million), Peng Xizhe (about 23 million), Judith Banister (about 30 million), Yang Jisheng (36 million) and Dikötter (45 million). The differences come from the assumed "normal" death rate, the treatment of the 1953 and 1964 census undercounts, and whether lost births are counted. Xinyang prefecture in Henan, the setting of slide k's photograph, was among the worst-hit places, with perhaps a million deaths.¹³ Slide hh treats the Third Front, which Ebrey mentions in one sentence: the program launched in 1964, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, to build heavy and defense industry in the southwest and northwest, taking roughly two-fifths of state investment through 1980. The Chengdu–Kunming Railway (opened 1970) and the Panzhihua steelworks are its emblems.¹⁴

Corrections and Sources Behind the Slide Notes

The student notes in this deck are written entirely for students and do not flag disagreements with the textbook. The slides teach the corrected history; this list records each correction, the page, the slide, and the source.

Where the deck departs from Ebrey, and why

The number of rightists (p. 480). Ebrey: "Altogether almost 3 million people were labeled rightists." The official count, released when the labels were removed after 1978, is 552,877 (sometimes given as 550,877). Higher totals count people punished under other labels or in the parallel rural campaigns of 1957–1958; Chung argues the official figure understates the campaign. The slide gives the official figure of about 550,000 and says historians think it was higher; the notes mention the textbook's figure as the top of the range. Slide h.
When the Great Leap began (p. 480). Ebrey: "In 1956, Mao began talking of a Great Leap Forward." The "leap forward" slogan appeared in People's Daily in November–December 1957, after Mao's Moscow speech; in 1956 Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun had in fact curbed a first "rash advance." The slide dates the promise to November 1957 and the launch to May 1958. Slide l. (MacFarquhar, vol. 2, 1983.)
The "Three Hard Years" (p. 482). Ebrey: 1959–1962. The official phrase covers 1959–1961, and mortality was highest in those years, peaking in 1960. The famine slide dates the famine to 1959–1961 and the retreat to 1960–1962. Slide q.
The famine's toll (p. 482). Kept as Ebrey's "on the order of 30 million" on the main slide. The Pierian Spring gives the published range of about 15 to 45 million and explains why estimates differ. Slides q and gg.
Weather and policy (p. 482). Ebrey's reading-guide sentence pairs "Mao's faulty economics" with "droughts and floods." The deck keeps the sentence but teaches, with most historians, that procurement based on false reports, not weather, caused most deaths. Slides o and q.
When urban household registration began (p. 483). Ebrey's wording implies the urban registration system was introduced after the Leap's industrial expansion was reversed. Registration began with the directive of June 1955, and the regulations of 9 January 1958 made it law; the reversal of 1961–1963 enforced it. Slide cc. (Cheng and Selden, 1994.)
China and the Vietnam War (p. 483). Ebrey: "China stayed on the sidelines, not even helping the Soviet Union supply North Vietnam." About 320,000 Chinese engineering and anti-aircraft troops served in North Vietnam in 1965–1969 (about 170,000 at the peak), and China sent large amounts of aid; it did obstruct Soviet shipments by rail. Slide w. (Chen Jian, 1995; Zhai, 2000.)
The Third Front (p. 483). Ebrey places the inland defense build-up after the border tensions with the Soviet Union. The program was launched in 1964, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, with the United States as the first imagined enemy; the Soviet threat became central after the border clashes of 1969. The slide says "fearing attack by America or the Soviet Union." Slide hh. (Naughton, 1988; Meyskens, 2020.)

Notes

Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 1, Contradictions among the People, 1956–1957 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). ↩
Gregor Benton and Alan Hunter, eds., Wild Lily, Prairie Fire: China's Road to Democracy, Yan'an to Tian'anmen, 1942–1989 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). ↩
Yen-lin Chung, "The Witch-Hunting Vanguard: The Central Secretariat's Roles and Activities in the Anti-Rightist Campaign," The China Quarterly 206 (2011): 391–411. ↩
Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). ↩
Li Rui, Lushan huiyi shilu [A true record of the Lushan Conference] (Beijing: Chunqiu chubanshe, 1989). ↩
Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, trans. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). ↩
Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). ↩
Shen Zhihua, A Short History of Sino-Soviet Relations, 1917–1991 (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). ↩
Chen Jian, "China's Involvement in the Vietnam War, 1964–69," The China Quarterly 142 (1995): 356–387; Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). ↩
John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). ↩
Tiejun Cheng and Mark Selden, "The Origins and Social Consequences of China's Hukou System," The China Quarterly 139 (1994): 644–668. ↩
Jeremy Brown, City Versus Countryside in Mao's China: Negotiating the Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). ↩
Judith Banister, China's Changing Population (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); Peng Xizhe, "Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China's Provinces," Population and Development Review 13, no. 4 (1987): 639–670; Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). ↩
Barry Naughton, "The Third Front: Defence Industrialization in the Chinese Interior," The China Quarterly 115 (1988): 351–386; Covell F. Meyskens, Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). ↩