Name: How Mao Zedong Got Away With Mass Murder | Great Leap Forward
Uploaded: 2021-07-01T14:06:28.000Z
Duration: 17 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Welcome to China Uncensored, I'm Chris Chappell.

This week, the Chinese Communist Party celebrates its 100-year anniversary.

And the Party is giving itself the best birthday present of all: the gift of changing its own

Like any 100-year old, the Chinese Communist Party wants to look good on its big day.

So Party officials don't like it when people bring up all the mistakes they made before.

In Party-speak, they call this “historical nihilism.”

Historical nihilism is anything that questions the Party's official rainbows-and-sunshine

Because questioning the Party's past also “means denying the 'inevitability' of

Chinese leader Xi Jinping blames historical nihilism for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And he's determined that's not going to happen to the Chinese Communist Party.

Which is why earlier this year, the Party launched a hotline for people to report any

“The tip line allows people to report fellow netizens who 'distort' the Party's history,

attack its leadership and policies, defame national heroes and 'deny the excellence

of advanced socialist culture' online.”

Reporting people for wrongthink: a proud communist tradition.

As a result of that campaign, Chinese authorities deleted 2 million online posts for historical

So let's commit some historical nihilism.

It's time to once again go down the memory hole, with our new segment on the Chinese

We call it 100 Years of Things That Never Happened.

Today we're talking about the Chinese Communist Party's most spectacular failure: The Great

You've got to hand it to Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong . He really knew how to

“Land Reform” sounds way better than “Killing Land Owners and Taking Their Stuff.”

The “Hundred Flowers Campaign” sounds way better than “Torturing Intellectuals

And the Great Leap Forward sounds way better than “Ruining the Economy While Killing

The Great Leap Forward was Mao's plan to supercharge China's transformation into

a communist utopia by collectivizing and industrializing the country at the same time.

But within two years, all of that collectivization and industrialization led to...mass starvation.

Other Communist Party officials wanted to industrialize the country more gradually,

It's kind of like when you decide that your New Year's Resolution is to quit smoking

and lose weight and exercise and then by February you realize you haven't met any of your

goals except for killing 45 million people.

Mao kicked off the Great Leap Forward after traveling to the Soviet Union in late 1957

and meeting Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

When Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would overtake the US in industrial

output in 15 years, Mao announced that China would overtake the UK in the same amount of

He was also competing with the Soviet Union.

He didn't like having to listen to the Soviets all the time and wanted China to develop its

And he saw the Great Leap Forward as his opportunity to do just that.

But before the Great Leap Forward could happen, Mao had to purge anyone who was standing in

Political purges: a proud communist tradition.

Mao started by forcing Party officials who had previously questioned his economic plans

He especially focused on Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, his second-in-command.

Zhou confessed to being guilty of “rightist conservative thinking” and repeatedly pledged

This was the beginning of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which Mao used to end any objections

By the end of the campaign, millions of people would be purged.

So what actually happened during the Great Leap Forward?

The Great Leap Forward started with a crazy competition.

Mao pitted Party officials against each other, who all competed for their region to grow

To meet increasingly impossible targets, people did all kinds of insane things.

People worked in the fields day and night.

They fertilized fields with things like white sugar, or human hair.

People even demolished houses to make fertilizer.

They planted crops more deeply and closer together to grow more.

Farmers knew that planting crops close together was actually bad and wouldn't increase output,

but they were afraid to say anything, because they didn't want to be purged as rightists.

Meanwhile Party officials were doing things like moving extra crops to the side of the

road when Mao would visit, so it looked like there were bumper harvests.

This is a famous photo from the Great Leap Forward.

It was meant to show that the wheat crop was so dense that four children could jump on

As Mao got more and more reports of record-breaking crop yields, most of which were fake, he believed

And he encouraged Chinese people to eat five meals a day.

Surely this won't have any unforeseen consequences.

To cope with the huge amounts of labor needed for agriculture, some areas started organizing

peasant farmers into huge communes that were set up like military units.

Mao approved, and by the summer of 1958, Party officials were encouraged to collectivize

Party officials predicted that China would soon achieve communism.

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How Mao Zedong Got Away With Mass Murder | Great Leap Forward

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