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Yang Xianzhen's Critique of the Great Leap Forward

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Michael Schoenhals
Michael Schoenhals
Affiliation:
Stockholm University
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Extract

Kang Sheng—a veteran counter-intelligence official and close political ally of Mao Zedong's—is said to have remarked in the winter of 1959 that among the critics of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) there was ‘One soldier’ and ‘One civilian’ whose criticisms were ‘in close harmony’. The soldier was Peng Dehuai, China's Minister of Defence, who had clashed with Mao at the Lushan Conference that summer, and whose criticism of the GLF had subsequently been denounced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee as an ‘attempt at splitting the Party´ and ‘a ferocious assault on the Party Center and Comrade Mao Zedong's leadership’. The civilian was Yang Xianzhen, the President of the Central Party School, who had aroused Kang's wrath by condemning the GLF as hopelessly Utopian, and by claiming that it already had brought on starvation and might yet bring about the collapse of the CCP.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , July 1992 , pp. 591 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

The research and writing of this paper were supported by a research grant from the Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSFR). I am indebted to Carol Lee Hamrin and Thomas Kampen for their valuable comments on an earlier draft.Google Scholar

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18 Ibid., 84–5; 105. For an overview of events in China in the summer and autumn of 1958 at the high point of the ‘transition to communism’, see Schoenhals, Michael, Saltationist Socialism: Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward 1958 (Stockholm Föreningen for Orientaliska Studier, 1987), 66–127.Google Scholar

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21 Ibid., 84.

22 Ibid., 86–7.

23 Ibid., 91.

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37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., 322–3. Incomplete text amended on the basis of Shoudu Pipan, 38.

40 Ibid., 323. Incomplete text amended on the basis of Shoudu Pipan, 6.

41 Ibid., 324. Incomplete text amended on the basis of Shoudu Pipan, 27.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., 321.

44 Ibid., 323.

45 Ibid., 322

46 Xianzhen, Yang, Wode Zhexue ‘Zuian’, 112.Google Scholar

47 Shan, Guan, 322–7. Incomplete text amended on the basis of Shoudu Pipan, 12.Google Scholar

48 Ibid., 327.

49 Pipan, Shoudu, 12–13.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 13.

51 Shan, Guan, 328.Google Scholar

52 Ibid., 330.

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55 Quotes from this talk are in Pipan, Shoudu, 38–9, and ‘Chedi Qingsuann’, 2. It is not referred to or quoted anywhere in recent official publications by or about Yang. Entries for September and October 1959 are conspicuously absent from the chronology of Yang's life included in Guan Shan, 110–25.Google Scholar

56 Kan, Zhong (pseud.), Kang Sheng Pingzhuan [Critical Biography of Kang Sheng] (Beijing: Hongqi Chubanshe, 1982), 360. Kang's appointment to this post had taken place on 15 March 1957.Google Scholar

57 Xianzhen, Yang, Wode Zhexue ‘Zuian’, 81.Google Scholar

58 Ruoyu, Fan, quoted in Hengwu, Ai, 44.Google Scholar

59 Zhongguo Renmin Jiefangjun Gaodeng Junshi Xueyuan ‘Honglian’ Bingtuan (ed.), Da Junfa, Da Yexinjia, Da Yinmoujia Peng Dehuai Fangeming Zuixing Huibian [The collected counter-revolutionary crimes of the great warlord, great careerist and great schemer Peng Dehuai] (Beijing, 1967), 40–1.Google Scholar

60 Xianzhen, Yang, Wode Zhexue ‘Zuian’, 148–9.Google Scholar

61 For some amusing examples of Peng's ‘disrespectful’ references to the Party Chairman, see Zhongguo Renmin Jiefangjun, 6–9.Google Scholar