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GCSE History · key term
Mao’s second Five-Year Plan, dated 1958–62, intended to accelerate China’s economic transformation through mass mobilisation and collective production.
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Paper 3
Revise: The Great Leap ForwardThe Great Leap Forward was Mao’s second Five-Year Plan, dated 1958–62 and launched in May 1958. It aimed to transform China rapidly into a major industrial power while accelerating the move towards a communist society. Industry and agriculture were meant to advance together: more food would feed industrial workers, while agricultural surpluses could be exported to help finance industrial development.
Paper 1
Mao Zedong’s campaign, launched in 1958, to accelerate agricultural and industrial production through collective organisation and the mobilisation of large numbers of people.
Keep the chronology clear: Dazhai became a national model in 1964, after the Great Leap Forward’s main disaster.
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The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, was Mao Zedong’s attempt to transform China rapidly into a powerful industrial and communist society. The campaign continued into the early 1960s, but its most devastating consequence was the famine of 1959–61.