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p The subjective errors in policy intensified the objectively existing difficulties and engendered new economic contradictions. By progressively accumulating they gave rise to failures and setbacks in China’s economy. All this pushed the leadership into feverish quests for new administrative solutions, made it look for a way to end all difficulties once and for all, and served as the medium nourishing fantastic, impracticable plans. Thus was born the programme of the "big leap" and "people’s communes”, which preposterously pursued the purpose of completing the building of socialism within a few years.

p Once launched, the "big leap" programme led to its direct antithesis. Every element of this programme contained the embryo of its own negation. Initially marked by a rapid expansion of production, it created the soil for a general 118 economic collapse which thrust the country’s economy many years back. While promising the working people "three years of hard work and ten thousand years of happiness”, it brought them to the verge of starvation and destitution. At first generating a rapid numerical growth of the working class, the "big leap" prepared the conditions for the subsequent sharp diminution of its ranks, the decline of the workers’ qualifications and the proletariat’s partial absorption by the peasantry.

The economic objective of the "big leap" was to achieve a sudden, convulsive, purely extensive expansion of production by straining every nerve to the breaking-point, organising paramilitary labour detachments and drawing the entire population into construction. The principal link of the new production system comprised not modern machinery or developed productive forces, but an enormous mass of small, semi-primitive enterprises. It was believed that together with the people’s communes these enterprises would secure a sharp increase of industrial and agricultural output.

Table 3 NUMERICAL’GROWTH OF FACTORY AND OFFICE WORKERS End of year total (’000) Growth compared with 1949 Percentage of factory and office workers in Percentage of factory and office workers COOO) production in the non-productive sphere 1949 8,094 — 65.0 35.0 1950 10,239 2,235 60.9 39.1 1951 12,815 4,811 63.8 36.2 1952 15,804 7,800 66.1 33.9 1953 18,256 10,252 67.7 32.3 1954 18,809 10,805 68.7 31.3 1955 19,076 11,072 68.5 31.5 1950 24,230 16,226 72.2 27.8 1957 24,506 16,502 72.9 27.1 Compiled on the basis of statistics given in The’ Great Decade, Chinese ed., Peking, lO.’iD.

p Naturally, the mushrooming of tens of thousands of small enterprises swelled the ranks of the working class. This rapid numerical growth of the proletariat did not signify a 119 simultaneous growth of the army of industrial workers. It was chiefly a growth of the number of semi-artisan proletarians, But even this process was soon cut short by the economic decline, which was the natural consummation of the policy of economic adventurism.

A grave economic regression was the price that China paid for this ill-advised experiment. Industrial output dropped by 50 per cent and agricultural output by 30 or 35 per cent. The country was left without food, and its factories found themselves without agricultural raw materials. The newly opened small enterprises had to be closed. Even the large iron and steel and engineering plants operated at 50-70 per cent of their capacity. Unemployment appeared, and an effort was made to tackle the problem by forcibly resettling roughly 30 million people, with 12 million factory and office workers among them, in rural areas. The ascents and slumps in the dynamic of the proletariat’s numerical growth caused by the movement of labour power to and from the towns gave rise to social collisions and to unrest among the workers.

Table 4 DYNAMIC OF THE NUMERICAL STRENGTH OF FACTOR Y AND OFFICE WORKERS IN CHINA DURING AND AFTER THE "DIG LEAP"* (’000,000) Year Year End of year total Growth (+ ) or decrease (—) compared with the preceding year 1958 45.3 +20.8 1959 45 . 4 + 0.1 1960 44.0 —1.4 1961 28—30** _14_l(i** 1962 30—31** + 1—2** 1963 32—33** -]- 2.0** 1964 34—35** -|- 2.0** * From 1958 onwards tlie category e[ factory and office workers lias included employees of county centres, villages and also rural enterprises and offices turned over to the people’s communes. ** Estimate.

The Mao group had no alternative but to beat a retreat and proclaim the “rectification” of mistakes, which marked the appearance of yet another new policy: "agriculture 120 constitutes the foundation”. The peasants were returned their auxiliary plots of land, which comprised 5 per cent of the total crop area and yielded 10 per cent of the gross farm output. The people’s communes system was reconsidered, the free market livened up, while the threat of mass unemployment compelled the Chinese leadership to institute an 8-hour working day.