What was the purpose of mao zedong’s great leap forward? increase china’s military

Lead to a massive increase in Chinese industrial and agricultural production.

Explanation: The Great Leap Forward was Mao Zedong’s political-economic plan that would last five years, starting in 1958. It was an attempt to modernize China, targeting the Industry and the Agriculture.

Mao consolidated the communist power in China in 1949. As a communist country, it was isolated in the international community and had no foreign aid to improve its economy. Because of that, Mao established that its own industry and agriculture could grow by allowing the other to grow. Industry would prosper with the work force and agriculture would prosper with industry’s modern tools. He divided the country into communes and in each of them the people would work with and for the commune. They would give up on the ownership of their tools, animals, goods and land for the commune and the commune would provide everything they needed. At first, it seemed like it was possible to achieve anything with this organization. However, less than a year later, the plan started to deteriorate. Collective farms with a centralized system based on productivity led to fatigue and people started dying of starvation. In the industry, the cheap production of machinery and the long shifts caused injuries and dead. People were not able to achieve what was required and those who couldn’t work enough were imprisoned. The Great Leap Forward was a failure and Mao himself admitted that “the chaos caused was on a great scale.” Even though Mao’s political-economic plan damaged the Chinese economy and caused the death of thousands, he was still popular among people and seen as the great leader of the Revolution.