Jean-Luc Domenach - The Origins of the Great Leap Forward: The Case of One Chinese Province

The Origins of the Great Leap Forward: The Case of One Chinese Province — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Origins of the Great Leap Forward: The Case of One Chinese Province" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...61

The Origins of the Great Leap Forward

Transitions: Asia and Asian America

Series Editor, Mark Selden

The Origins of the Great Leap Forward:
The Case of One Chinese Province , Jean-Luc Domenach

Privatizing Malaysia: Rents, Rhetoric, Realities, edited by Jomo K. S.

The Politics of Democratization:
Generalizing East Asian Experiences ,
edited by Edward Friedman

Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoi , Kayano Shigeru

The Political Economy of China's Financial Reforms:
Finance in Late Development , Paul Bowles and Gordon White

Reinventing Vietnamese Socialism:
Doi Moi in Comparative Perspective,
edited by William S. Turley and Mark Selden

FORTHCOMING

City States in the Global Economy: Industrial Restructuring in Hong Kong
and Singapore , Stephen Chiu, Kong-Chong Ho, and Tai-lok Lui

Unofficial Histories: Chinese Reportage from the Era of Reform,
edited by Thomas Moran

Workers in the Cultural Revolution , Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun

Twentieth-Century China: An Interpretive History , Peter Zarrow

Cooperative Innovation and Late Development:
Technological Catch-up in Japan , Donna L. Doane

Moving Mountains: Women and Feminism in Japan, Kanai Yoshiko

The Middle Peasant and Social Change:
The Communist Movement in the Taihang Base Area, 1937-1945,
David Goodman

The Chinese Triangle and the Future of the
Asia-Pacific Region, Hsin-huang Michael Hsiao and Alvin So

Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan, Chih-ming Ka

The Origins of the Great Leap Forward

The Case of One Chinese Province

Jean-Luc Domenach

Translated by A M Berrett

First published 1995 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1995 by Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Domenach, Jean-Luc.
[Aux origines du Grand Bond en avant. English]
The origins of the great leap forward: the case of one Chinese
province / Jean-Luc Domenach: translated by A.M. Berrett.
p. cm. (TransitionsAsia and Asian America)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-1710-X. ISBN 0-8133-2514-5 (if published as a paperback)
1. Henan Province (China)Politics and government. I. Title.
II. Series.
DS793.H5D6513 1995
951'.18055dc20 94-38713
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29460-1 (hbk)

Contents

1. Part One
   The Economic and Social Crisis in Henan in 19561957
2. Part Two
   The Political Crisis of Spring and Summer 1957
3. Part Three
   The Emergence of Henan Radicalism (August 1957September 1958)

1. Part One
   The Economic and Social Crisis in Henan in 19561957
2. Part Two
   The Political Crisis of Spring and Summer 1957
3. Part Three
   The Emergence of Henan Radicalism (August 1957September 1958)

1. xviii
2. xix

Guide

Mark Selden

Jean-Luc Domenach's Grand Bond en Avant was the first major study of the Great Leap Forward and its origins in any language. It remains the most probing work on the period, a seminal yet barely studied moment that set the course of mobilizational collectivism that characterized the late Mao years. Domenach suggests controversial political and social answers to a series of troubling dilemmas for students of China and of socialism: How was it possible for China's ruling party, which had come to power in the course of several decades of successful rural mobilization, to launch a movement so divorced from social reality? Above all, how are we to understand the decision to press the movement to the point of chaos and economic collapse, giving rise to arguably the greatest famine in human history and causing, depending on whose statistics one finds persuasive, 15 to 30 million or more deaths, nearly all of them in the countryside?

In this book, in contrast to other studies that focus on national politics, Domenach provides a closeup of a single critical province, Henan, the national model of the Leap, and subsequently, the leader in famine deaths. Through the close study of documentary sources, particularly provincial and local newspapers, he illuminates the dynamics of a political process that would eventually press beyond reason of humanity. Under the frenzied conditions of the Leap, what counted most in the calculus of national and provincial politics was not the fate of marginalized peasants and other working people, but overcoming political rivals and winning the support of patrons, ultimately of Mao Zedong.

In illuminating the rewards as well as the risks for models, whether local, regional, or national units or individuals, the work clarifies a distinctive feature of Chinese politics, the binary opposition between those who benefit from the favors that the state bestows and those left to survive by their wits and through such protective networks as they can create. The emergence of this relatively poor North China plains province as the national model brought Henan important symbolic and material rewards ranging from Mao's praise to featured status in the national press to the hidden economic benefits that invariably flowed to models.

Ironically, however, the very processes that gave rise to mobilizational models could produce disaster, as in Henan and many other areas singled out for praise during the Leap. This is because sustaining a front-runner position required promoting zealotry to the highest degree. As the provincial model of the Leap, Henan generated the most extreme labor-intensive and leveling policies and outstripped others in announcing impossible production figures. These policies led to famine disasters not only because they pressed alienated people beyond human endurance but also because localities claiming miraculous production results then had to make good on the highest levels of sales to the state, receiving low state prices for their grain. In the famine that followed the Leap, Henan reportedly had more deaths than any other province, ranging in the millions. Entire villages were depopulated in some of the hardest hit prefectures.

Domenach was the first scholar to recognize, in the persistent calls to establish dashe, or enlarged cooperatives, in the early 1950s, an important dynamic that later culminated in the Leap. Although the party sometimes spoke reassuringly of gradual voluntary cooperation, pressures for giantism, leveling, and market elimination gained momentum and led ineluctably to the formation of large state-imposed collectives of the Soviet type and the transfer of the rural surplus to state industry and the cities. From the collectivization drive that crescendoed in 1955-1956, it was but a small step to the utopianism of the communes and the Leap with their extreme leveling and the messianic belief that the millennium was at hand. This then is a critical work in searching for the roots of Communist fundamentalism in the Chinese revolution.

Next page

1234567...61

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Origins of the Great Leap Forward: The Case of One Chinese Province»

Look at similar books to The Origins of the Great Leap Forward: The Case of One Chinese Province. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Jean Barman

British Columbia in the Balance: 1846–1871

Frans X. Plooij

The Wonder Weeks, Leap 1: How to Stimulate Your Babys Mental Development and Help Him Turn His 10 Predictable, Great, Fussy Phases Into Magical Leaps Forward

Hetty van de Rijt

The Wonder Weeks, Leap 4: How to Stimulate Your Babys Mental Development and Help Him Turn His 10 Predictable, Great, Fussy Phases Into Magical Leaps Forward

Jean-Luc Domenach

Chinas Uncertain Future

Xin Liu

Chinas Cultural Diplomacy: A Great Leap Outward?

Frederick C. Teiwes

Chinas Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Great Leap Forward, 1955-59: Mao, Central Politicians and Provincial Leaders in the Great Leap Forward, 1955-59

Jean-Philippe Rollet

Conqueror And Administrator:: Civil And Military Actions Of Marshal Louis-Gabriel Suchet In The Spanish Province Of Aragon, 1808

Farrar Straus and Giroux.

Tombstone: the great Chinese famine, 1958-1962

Gary Campbell

Fredericton;N.-B;Nouveau-Brunswick (Province);Rivière Saint-Jean (Maine et

Tommy Baker

The Leap of Your Life: How to Redefine Risk, Quit Waiting For ’Someday,’ and Live Boldly

Jean Manco

Blood of the Celts

Alexander J. Field Ph.D.

A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth

Discussion, reviews of the book The Origins of the Great Leap Forward: The Case of One Chinese Province and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.