[6] Local officials were fearful of the so-called "Anti-Right Deviation Struggle" and they competed to fulfill or over-fulfill quotas which were based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting non-existent "surpluses" and leaving farmers to starve to death.

Attempts were made to enhance rural education and the status of women (allowing them to initiate divorce if they desired) and ending foot-binding, child marriage and opium addiction.

Moderates within the Party, including Zhou Enlai, argued for a reversal of collectivization on the grounds that claiming the bulk of the harvest for the state had made the people's food-security dependent upon the constant, efficient, and transparent functioning of the government.

He was critical of Khrushchev's reversal of Stalinist policies and he was also alarmed by the uprisings that had taken place in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the perception that the USSR was seeking "peaceful coexistence" with the Western powers.

According to Jonathan Mirsky, a historian and a journalist who specialized in Chinese affairs, China's isolation from most of the rest of the world, along with the Korean War, had accelerated Mao's attacks on his perceived domestic enemies.

This drew the attention of Zhou Enlai, Li Xiannian and others, and at a state meeting held on 5 June 1956, proposals were made to curb impetuousness and rash advances, revise the 1956 national economic plan, and cut capital construction investment.

[27] The initial projects of the Great Leap Forward were accelerating the construction of waterworks on the North China Plain during the 1957-1958 winter and next the development of people's communes and crude forms of rural industrialization.

[37] The central idea behind the Great Leap was that China should "walk on two legs", by rapidly developing both heavy and light industry, urban and rural areas, and large and small scale labor.

Distrusting technical experts,[39] Mao and the party sought to replicate the strategies used in its 1930s regrouping in Yan'an following the Long March: "mass mobilization, social leveling, attacks on bureaucratism, [and] disdain for material obstacles".

[48] partly due to misreporting, or corruption at every level of the government where they would over-report harvest and steel production, by the time people realized, it was too late to correct statistics without angering Mao.

[This paragraph needs citation(s)] During 1958–1960 China continued to be a substantial net exporter of grain, despite the widespread famine which was being experienced in the countryside, as Mao sought to maintain face and convince the outside world of the success of his plans.

[108] Chen Yizi, a top adviser to CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and former head of the Institute for Economic Structural Reform,[109] concluded 43 million died in the famine after conducting a county-by-county review of deaths in five provinces and performing extrapolation.

[110] Chen was part of a large investigation group led by the Institute for Economic Structural Reform which "visited every province and examined internal Party documents and records".

[107] Coale's, Banister's, Ashton et al.'s, and Peng's figures all include adjustments for demographic reporting errors, though Dikötter, in his book Mao's Great Famine, argues that their results, as well as Chang and Halliday's, Yang's, and Cao's, are still underestimates.

[129] Yang Jisheng, a former CCP member and former reporter for the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, puts the blame squarely on Maoist policies and the political system of totalitarianism,[68] such as diverting agricultural workers to steel production instead of growing crops, and exporting grain at the same time.

[130][131] During the course of his research, Yang uncovered that some 22 million tons of grain was held in public granaries at the height of the famine, reports of starvation went up the bureaucracy only to be ignored by top officials, and the authorities ordered that statistics be destroyed in regions where population decline became evident.

"[134][135] Economist Steven Rosefielde argues that Yang's account "shows that Mao's slaughter was caused in considerable part by terror-starvation; that is, voluntary manslaughter (and perhaps murder) rather than innocuous famine.

"[136] Yang claims that local party officials were indifferent to the large number of people dying around them, as their primary concern was the delivery of grain, which Mao wanted to use to pay back debts to the USSR totaling 1.973 billion yuan.

"[145] Mobo Gao suggested that the Great Leap Forward's terrible effects came not from malignant intent on the part of the Chinese leadership at the time, but instead related to the structural nature of its rule, and the vastness of China as a country.

[147][148] The 1981 Resolution also states that, "it was mainly due to the errors of the Great Leap Forward and of the struggle against 'Right opportunism' together with a succession of natural calamities and the perfidious scrapping of contracts by the Soviet Government that our economy encountered serious difficulties between 1959 and 1961, which caused serious losses to our country and people.

"[150] Despite the risks to their careers, some CCP members openly laid blame for the disaster at the feet of the Party leadership and took it as proof that China must rely more on education, acquiring technical expertise and applying bourgeois methods in developing the economy.

[153] According to Joseph Ball, writing in the Monthly Review, there is a good argument to suggest that the policies of the Great Leap Forward did a lot to sustain China's overall economic growth, after an initial period of disruption.

During its 1960 construction, Oil Minister Yu Qiuli mobilized workers through ideological motivation instead of material incentives, focusing enthusiasm, energy, and resources to complete a rapid industrialization project.

[7] According to Thaxton, the CCP's policies included plunder, forced labor, and starvation, which led villagers "to think about their relationship with the Communist Party in ways that do not bode well for the continuity of socialist rule.

Liu Shaoqi (the new PRC Chairman) and reformist Deng Xiaoping (CCP General Secretary) were left in charge to change policy to bring economic recovery.

Criticism from Minister of National Defense Peng Dehuai, who, discovered that people from his home province starved to death caused him to write a letter to Mao to ask for the policies to be adapted.

We must always remember these painful learning experiences.During the discussion of the Third Five Year Plan, Mao made similar statements about the Great Leap Forward having "extended the infrastructure battlefront too long", acknowledging that it was "best to do less and well".

[179] In addition, according to historian Philipp Brigham, the failures of the Great Leap Forward significantly contributed to the Cultural Revolution, which is another pivotal event in modern Chinese politics that happened later in Chairman Mao’s regime.

Specifically, he posits that one of the main objectives of the Cultural Revolution was to extricate Chairman Mao and the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party from the responsibility for the Great Leap Forward.

[180] According to Brigham's explanation, Chairman Mao and the central committee tried to incite through the Cultural Revolution that the Great Leap Forward had failed despite the right direction from above due to inadequate leadership of the local cadres.