One similarity between Stalins 5 year plan and Mao Zedongs Great Leap Forward
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Answer:
Explanation:
Similarities between Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin 5-12 to 5-13-14
After winning the Chinese Civil War, Mao Zedong set out to remake China into a modern Communist country. Much like Stalin in the Soviet Union, he believed that China needed to modernize at any cost. In order to do this, he instituted a number of economic and social changes.
1. The Great Leap Forward – 1958-1963
The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s plan to modernize China in
five years. Mao believed that both agriculture and industry had to grow in order to accomplish this. Industry could only prosper if the work force was well fed, while the
agricultural workers needed industry to produce the tools needed for modernization. Overnight, fertile rice fields ploughed over, and factory construction work began.
China was reformed into a series of communes, or giant collective farms. People in a commune gave up their ownership of tools, animals, etc. so that everything was owned by the commune. People now worked for the commune and not for themselves. The life of an individual was controlled by the commune. By the end of 1958, 700 million people had been placed into 26,578 communes. The speed with which this was achieved was astounding.
The government did all that it could to whip up enthusiasm for the communes. Propaganda was everywhere – including in the fields where the workers could listen to political speeches as they worked as the communes provided public address systems. Everybody involved in communes was urged not only to meet set targets but to beat them. If the communes lacked machinery, the workers used their bare hands. Major constructions were built in record time – though the quality of many was not very good. Also, former farmers had no idea how to actually use the new factories and what was once fertile crop land went to waste on a disastrous scale.
Over just a few years, the Great Leap Forward caused massive environmental damage in China. The steel production plan resulted in entire forests being burned to fuel factories, which left the land open to erosion. Dense cropping and deep ploughing made farmland useless and unable to support any crops.
Anxious commune leaders vastly exaggerated their harvests, hoping to impress the Communist leadership. As a result, Party officials carried off most of the food to serve as the cities' share of the harvest, leaving the farmers with nothing to eat. People in the countryside began to starve.
The next year, the Yellow River flooded, killing 2 million people either by drowning or by starvation after crop failures. In 1960, a wide-spread drought added to the nation's misery. In the end, through a combination of disastrous economic policy and adverse weather conditions, an estimated 20 to 48 million people died in China. Most starved to death in the countryside.
2. The Cultural Revolution
The “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was a ten-year political campaign – the goal was to cement Mao’s control of the Communist Party. After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, many party members began to try and push Mao aside. The cultural revolution was about maintaining Mao’s position of power. Mao Zedong and his wife, Jiang Qing, directed popular anger against other members of the party leadership. Those who were not deemed loyal enough to Mao were subject to beating, imprisonment, torture, and execution. While others were removed from office, Mao was named supreme commander of the nation and army.
A major aspect of the cultural revolution was developing support among young people. Mao closed schools and encouraged students to join Red Guard units, which denunciated and persecuted Chinese teachers and intellectuals, engaged in widespread book burnings, facilitated mass relocations, and enforced Mao's cult of personality.
However, the enthusiasm of the Red Guards nearly pushed China into chaos. The Red Guards quickly got out of hand. Schools and colleges were closed and the economy started to suffer. Groups of Red Guards fought Red Guards as each separate unit believed that it knew best how China should proceed. Some Red Guard groups began to torture and execute people they didn’t believe werethe cultural revolution was widespread use of propaganda.rs made Mao into a larger than life figure and encouraged young people to inform on anyone criticizing the government.
With regard to the great teacher Chairman Mao, cherish the word 'Loyalty', 1968
Criticize the old world and build a new one with