High Tide Rhetoric Analysis

Western commentary appearing in circulation between 1953 and 1965 was cautiously declinist, predicting a loss of living standards gained during the initial land reform years. This opinion was largely based upon the notion that Mao’s FFYP was to be firmly rooted in the Soviet model of FFYP, the latter having caused a substantial decline in peasant living standards and conditions. In these terms, the ambitious FFYP, geared towards the rapid industrialisation of heavy and light industry, was judged, a Christopher Howe terms it, to be too heavily reliant on the “small-scale, technologically un-modernized” rural sector (Howe 2006, p.755). Contextually, a Cold-War rhetoric infused relevant academic discourse (ibid, p. 756). Academic perspectives either rejected or accepted this western-inclined rhetoric. This can be attributed to the general lack of information that emerged from China during this period, with little access to systematic fieldwork or data in China, academics were …show more content…
Access to previously restricted information has given commentators outside of China added insight into the change of events that came about on the eve of the Socialist High Tide. It is now evident that in the summer of 1955, when faced with party debate on the pace of collectivisation, Mao chose to hasten the speed on the road to Socialism, raising target numbers for cooperatives form 650,000 to 1.3 million. Moreover, in hindsight, scholars can now definitively judge the success of this decision. On this, the general consensus is that the “left deviationist” line, and the accelerated shift from lower level cooperatives to higher level cooperatives in 1956 was a “huge mistake” on behalf of the CCP. With the ability to place the High Tide into another, wider narrative, some modern commentators have stated