The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China (PRC) is an economic and social campaign by the Communist Party of China (CPC) from 1958 to 1961.

The campaign is led by Mao Zedong and aims to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through rapid industrialization and collectivization.

The campaign leads to the Great Chinese Famine.Chief changes in the lives of rural Chinese include the introduction of a mandatory process of agricultural collectivization, which is introduced incrementally.

Private farming is prohibited, and those engaged in it are labeled as counter revolutionaries and persecuted.

Restrictions on rural people are enforced through public struggle sessions, and social pressure, although people also experience forced labor.

Rural industrialization, officially a priority of the campaign, sees "its development ... aborted by the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward."

(Perkins, Dwight (1991).

"China's Economic Policy and Performance".

Chapter 6 in The Cambridge History of China, volume 15, ed.

by Roderick MacFarquhar, John K. Fairbank and Denis Twitchett.

Cambridge University Press.

)The Great Leap ends in catastrophe, resulting in tens of millions of excess deaths.

Estimates of the death toll range from 18 million to 45 million,with estimates by demographic specialists ranging from 18 million to 32.5 million.

Historian Frank Dikötter asserts that "coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the very foundation of the Great Leap Forward" and it "motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history".

(Dikötter, Frank (2010).

1-4088-1219-3 Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62.

Walker & Company.

)The years of the Great Leap Forward in fact see economic regression, with 1958 through 1962 being the only period between 1953 and 1985 in which China's economy sees negative growth.

Political economist Dwight Perkins argues, "enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all.

...

In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster."

In subsequent conferences in 1960 and 1962, the negative effects of the Great Leap Forward are studied by the CPC, and Mao is criticized in the party conferences.

Moderate Party members like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping rise to power, and Mao is marginalized within the party, leading him to initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966.