<h1> Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward Is A Prime Example Of How Bad Economic Policy Can Have Disastrous Results</h1>

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/2090745339/Mao-Tse-Tung.jpg

Most people today don’t think that politicians can do that much damage to a country because there are usually other people who keep them in check. While they are mostly correct and the example im going to give is a bit on the extreme, bad economic policies can have disastrous results if given the right economic or geopolitical climate. With more extreme measures being taken by governments all over the world , like negative interest rates or long lasting Quantitative Easing, it is important to look at history the effect bad economic policies can have on a society. In the example I want to use, I will be talking about how Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward ended up becoming a piece of economic policy that lead to the deaths of millions of people. 

It is estimated around 45 million people died in only a four year period as a direct result of the Great Leap Forward, which makes Mao, who spear headed the policy, directly responsible for the most deaths in human history. More people died in four years than Hitler, Stalin or any other crazed dictator in history killed. The saddest part was that it could have all been avoided if his advisors or specialists had been listened to. They either knew it was a terrible idea and were afraid to speak up or were mostly ignored, not unsimilar to many policies that are being created today. So how was something that ended up being so deadly even get started?

http://chineseposters.net/images/pc-1958-024.jpg

Facing financial pressures after WWII and the recent expulsion of the Nationalist party, lead by Chaing Kai Shek , who would go on to be the long standing developer and president of Taiwan, an extremist community view was taken by Mao Tse Tung to create a government monopoly over farms so they could set the prices and raise enough money to modernize. Privatization of land was abolished and the government took extreme actions to force Chinese Farmers to either farm on government owned land or pursue other jobs like backyard steel making. Except the steel that was being made was of terrible quality and overall useless. They did not have the knowledge to make steel and the government did not facilitate the creation of factories to create higher quality steel. This sounds ridiculous now, but at the time the Mao thought this would create a self sustained economy that would be able to produce everything for themselves and everything could be shared.

Private kitchens were forcibly destroyed and large communal dining halls were now a requirement for communities. If you wanted to eat, you would bring your family to a communal dining hall and eat. Except, with many people leaving farming, or the farmers not having incentives to harvest large amounts because it would just go to the collective group, there ended up being  a deficit of farmed rice. In addition there was little governance in the communities over how much people ate and how much they actually contributed. Compounded with a few years of bad harvests, many citizens were left with nothing to eat. Because they had transitioned into new lines of work , there was no land to go back and farm food for and eventually entire communities starved to death. The government didn’t incentivize farming enough and did not import enough rice to support the bulk of their citizens. In addition to other bad policies like telling people to hunt species that would hurt crops, like the Eurasian humming bird, which in return lead to locusts ( a natural prey of the humming bird) rising in population and killing existing plants, Mao proved inadequate and lacking the knowledge he needed to run a country. 

http://thegenocidemuseum.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/0/6/14061348/976562_orig.jpg

Mao often hired people to do jobs who were good communists but terrible specialists, which lead to disaster over and over again. He was also willing to sacrifice fertile farm land and people’s lives for the “good of the majority” which caused more deaths that could have been avoided. After the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s death in 1976, the country took a radical change to how they operated and started to follow a more capitalist model which is why they have been so economically successful as they are today. Had Mao not had continuously made terrible economic decisions, China might be much better off than it is today. Not only did millions of people die during the bad economic policies of The Great Leap Forward, but multiple generations fostered anti governmental ideas, that I still believe will eventually see the collapse of the Chinese Community Party. Like I said before, I chose an example that was a bit extreme, but don’t take economic policies lightly because you never know the effects that bad ones can have.

-Calaber24p