My grandpa Yue Zhou was a 27-year-old college instructor in communist China at the time of the Great Leap Forward, which took place from 1958 through 1963. It was a time of extreme hardship for the people of China.
The Great Leap Forward was initiated by the chairman of China at the time, Mao Zedong. Mao’s goal was to rapidly develop agriculture and industry in China, and to transform China into a modern, industrialized communist society.
For my family, like most Chinese families, Mao’s plan caused great hardship. My grandparents were both teachers, and they made very little money. On top of their profession, they also had to work trying to make steel. There was a severe shortage on all supplies.
Mao’s idea was to use the great mass of the Chinese people to replace expensive machinery. The land of each family was taken away from them and merged into communes. People would work in communes consisting of about 5,000 families each. Harvests were much less than in previous years, but local officials reported impossibly high results in order to compete with each other. The government used this falsely high number to determine how much they would tax the crops. This resulted in a tax so high that there was barely anything left for the peasants. This, as well as other factors, lead to widespread famine.
“Supplies were so limited, the sale of everything was controlled – we had to have tickets in order to buy meat, eggs, rice, oil, and et cetera,” my grandpa recalled in a telephone interview from China. “My mother was in the countryside then and was starving. She fell ill and died during the Great Leap Forward. Because Grandma and I were young, we suffered but survived. It was terribly hard. We saved everything we earned for our children and my mother.”
“No one had enough to eat. Some peasants in the countryside resorted to eating grass and tree bark just to survive. Often we went hungry so our kids and my mother could eat,” he said.
As well as agriculture, Chairman Mao thought that steel production would be the key to China’s development. With no knowledge of steel metallurgy at all, he wanted people to build furnaces in their backyards and to create steel out of scrap metal. This method was a huge waste of human labor and resources, and produced basically no quality steel at all. Everyone had to do backbreaking labor for long hours, my grandpa said.
“Everyone had to work in military-like units. Regardless of their physical condition, they had to work extremely hard with almost nothing to eat,” he said. “My salary was so low, and we were really poor. My health was deteriorating. Your grandma had to work as hard as the men did. She became ill from working so hard in such bad conditions. Even to this day, she still has heart problems and arthritis from overworking back then.”
China’s land was stripped of trees in order to fuel all of the furnaces, causing terrible floods because without trees there was nothing to hold in the soil, which usually would absorb water from heavy rains.
“Mao Zedong and some of the other Chinese leaders were too reckless and tried to speed up the advancement of the country prematurely,” said my grandpa. “Mao was a person with fantasy ideologies. He initiated the Great Leap Forward. Of course the plan didn’t work because it was a very unrealistic plan.”
Even now, the effects of the Great Leap Forward are obvious in my grandparents. They still live frugally, trying to save money wherever they can. They would never spend money they didn’t have, and they never eat out, even though restaurants in China can be very low priced. They still remember and are thankful to the people who helped them out when they were in need, and they try their best to return the favor now that they are better off.
My grandparents learned some lessons from the hardship they went through. “Always plan realistically. Don’t make plans according to fantasies,” my grandpa said. “Leaders’ mistakes can cause tremendous suffering of the people, so don’t follow leaders blindly. Experience is the only standard that verifies the truth.”
Finally, he had one last piece of advice: “Try to look after your family as much as possible, especially during hard times.”
Even though I already knew some things about China’s past, talking to my grandpa has put me in a much better position to understand my grandparents and the way they do things. I now have greater respect for them, for what they went through and for the way they are today. I am so thankful for the life I am able to live thanks to their and my parents’ hard work.
Angela Zhang translated her interview with her grandfather from Chinese to English for this story.
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