THE gREAT LEAP FORWARD
The Great Leap Forward was a economic campaign that Mao Zedong had put in place to increase farm and industrial output. He aimed to use China's large farming population to it's advantage and change the nation into modern industrial state. To achieve this level of productivity Mao created communes where as many as 25,000 people would live; from this they would be divided down into smaller units to carry out jobs. Communes consisted of schools, dining halls, factories, and housing. Communes changed the way of life of the farmers who instead of producing enough for their families and selling the rest, now lost their possessions and worked to reach high production quotas and wages were replaced with work points. In the end The Great Leap Forward was a failure that ended up casing a famine that killed 30 million due to harmful agricultural innovations, attempt to produce steel in "backyard" industries that only created low quality products and took away from farming, and local officials exaggerating the produced product leaving less for the peasants.