{"id":3889,"date":"2005-07-24T11:43:14","date_gmt":"2005-07-24T18:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2005\/07\/24\/a-great-leap-backward-john-gittings\/"},"modified":"2005-07-24T11:43:14","modified_gmt":"2005-07-24T18:43:14","slug":"a-great-leap-backward-john-gittings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2005\/07\/a-great-leap-backward-john-gittings\/","title":{"rendered":"A great leap backward &#8211; John Gittings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nFrom the Guardian, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.howardwfrench.com\/archives\/2005\/07\/24\/a_great_leap_backward_idealist_or_monster_the_controversy_over_maos_legacy_refuses_to_die\/\">via A Glimpse of the World: <\/a>\n<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nFifty years ago this month, when China was finally at peace after decades of war, Mao Zedong launched a new revolution in the countryside &#8211; for reasons that are still highly controversial. Mao insisted that the peasants wanted more and bigger cooperatives; they were a &#8220;blank sheet of paper&#8221; on which beautiful socialist words could be written. China could not mark time in the transition to socialism, or else it would go backwards.<\/p>\n<p>Mao&#8217;s impatience in that July of 1955 set in train a tragic sequence of events which led first to the people&#8217;s communes and the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61. The failure of the Great Leap amid serious famine encouraged his critics to speak out, and led in turn to the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) when he sought to crush their &#8220;revisionism&#8221;. Finally, reacting against the last two turbulent decades of Mao&#8217;s life, his successors have jettisoned socialist policies, moderate as well as extreme, and embraced capitalism in all but name.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the Guardian, via A Glimpse of the World: Fifty years ago this month, when China was finally at peace after decades of war, Mao Zedong launched a new revolution in the countryside &#8211; for reasons that are still highly controversial. Mao insisted that the peasants wanted more and bigger cooperatives; they were a &#8220;blank [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[935,1892,5907],"class_list":["post-3889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-books","tag-john-gittings","tag-mao-zedong","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v23.9 (Yoast SEO v23.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A great leap backward - John Gittings<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2005\/07\/a-great-leap-backward-john-gittings\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A great leap backward - John Gittings\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the Guardian, via A Glimpse of the World: Fifty years ago this month, when China was finally at peace after decades of war, Mao Zedong launched a new revolution in the countryside &#8211; for reasons that are still highly controversial. 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