Factory Management and Political Ambiguity, 1961–63

Abstract

The Great Leap Forward was an attempt radically to transform, or perhaps more correctly, an attempt to begin a process of radically transforming the political and economic face of China. In China's still relatively small, but crucially important industrial systems, the legacy of the Great Leap was a very ambiguous one. This ambiguity, it should be noted, flowed to a much greater extent from the tentative nature of many unprecedented experiments in organization and incentives in China's factories and planning systems, than from the application of a consistently and logically injter-related set of “radical” or “dogmatic” principles applied a priori to social reality.