In 1958, during the initial stages of the Great Leap Forward, he participated enthusiastically in the "anti-hoarding campaign" in Guangdong, believing that reported production figures were real, and that the observed food shortage was only due to peasants' hoarding.

Nonetheless, in Guangdong, Tao's government took steps to reverse the damage of the Great Leap Forward by expanding individual peasant ownership of land and allowing emigration to Hong Kong.

Tao was a Vice Premier of the State Council and Secretary of the Central Secretariat of the CPC, as well as an advisor to the Cultural Revolution Group.

Tao and Zhao were among the most enthusiastic of the early pro-Red Guard CPC leaders, but quickly fell from favour because they tried to control the excesses of the radical leftists led by Zhang Chunqiao and Jiang Qing.

[2] During an enlarged Politburo meeting in 1966 he was attacked by Wang Li, a junior member of the CRG, for curtailing revolution with the excuse of protecting production.

He defended treating the cases of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping as contradictions among the people, this caused Mao's displease and, despite the encouragement of Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao to adopt a more passive attitude, the attacks by the CRG persisted.