Did the Great Leap Forward produce the kind of economic consequences that Mao hoped it would?
The Great Leap Forward actually ended in disaster. There were a number of reasons for that. Number one, Mao was a man of ideas and he believed in ideas. He thought as long as you have ideas, as long as you have brave ideas, courage that you can think of some great plan to leap forward, to jump, then you can have a fast speed of development. But obviously we know that is against nature, against, you know, human rationality. Many of the policies implemented then were not rational. For example, in order to catch up with the West in terms of steel production, Mao thought one way to overcome the shortage of supply of iron that [was] needed for steel production, was by mobilizing the masses. China can find a way of producing ore. The way that it [worked] eventually was to appeal to the people to donate anything that made of iron including woks, which is, you know, one of the Chinese essentials in household. Household goods were donated to the steel making plants and some of them are actually
