Praxis II Citizenship

Answer: B - In 1958, Mao Zedong initiated the Great Leap Forward in a bid to make agrarian China an industrialized society, in keeping with the model of communism that the Soviet Union demonstrated. (China became a Communist state in 1949.) The Great Leap Forward was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history, and by 1961 even Chairman Mao had to admit defeat and abandon the campaign. At the outset, China plowed under many of its vast fields, and a people who had been rural farmers for several millennia were suddenly shepherded into communes and factories, which they were ill-prepared to operate. To make matters worse, the country also undertook the Four Pests Campaign, which aimed to eradicate rats, flies, mosquitos, and sparrows. While sparrows did eat grain, they also ate bugs, and killing nearly every sparrow in China only allowed the insect population to spiral out of control-locusts descended on the remaining crop fields. The relatively scant food China managed to produce was divided between exports and the Chinese people. Citizens received their food from the government; officials distributed grain by the spoonful according to each person’s production rate. Virtually the whole Great Leap Forward was beset by famine, which ultimately claimed an estimated 20 to 45 million people, making it the worst famine in recorded history. Worse still, the world later discovered that the Chinese government had also carried out an extensive campaign to torture or eliminate citizens who were considered disobedient. Anywhere from two to five million people were murdered on orders from the state and another one to three million people committed suicide.