Mao started his "Great Leap Forward" with his motivation to surpass the United States of America. His mission was to create a socialist economy. This means he wanted to give more money to the people producing the crops in the fields. Everything Mao tried always seemed to fail and could never work the way he wanted too. The peasants in China were told to build backyard blastfurnaces to make iron and steel for tools. Instead of melting scraps of metal to make utensils and tools, the naive peasants used tools and utensils to melt into unusable amounts of metal. Another example, was the "Great Leap Forward" made the labors stop producing food and switch to making metal which ended up causing a shortage of food in the cities and farms. Basically the "Great Leap Forward" was not what it was supposed to be and actually failed miserably, which is why it should be called the Great Leap Backward.
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/greatleap.htm
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Nice post Elle, the idea of smelting peoples utensils from the start did not sound very intelligent, and also taking people away from doing agricultural work didn't sound smart. I can't believe that Moa didn't see rite away that this wouldn't work. Although some of his mistakes were a matter of having common sense, some of the ideas that you mentioned did seem very wise. Particularly the idea of giving more money to the farmers. Since most people were farmers, China could have been a richer nation, and I can see why Moa would come up with this idea. I believe that it failed because It made everyone stay at a really low class in society, and that isn't really a leap forward.
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