Great Leap Forward, in Chinese history, the campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party between 1958 and early 1960 to organize China’s vast population, especially in large-scale rural communes, to meet the country’s industrial and agricultural problems. The Chinese hoped to develop labor-intensive methods of industrialization, which would emphasize manpower rather than machines and capital expenditure. Thereby, it was hoped, the country could bypass the slow, more typical process of industrialization through gradual accumulation of...