Why did the Cultural Revolution encourage rural self-sufficiency in food production?

During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government promoted rural self-sufficiency in food production primarily due to ideological and security considerations.12

This policy, which predated the Cultural Revolution, aimed to ensure that local areas could sustain themselves. A significant consequence of this mandate was an intense focus on grain production, which led to the adoption of irrational and uneconomical cropping patterns across the country.12

While the Cultural Revolution was largely an urban political phenomenon, this push for self-sufficiency was one of the two major dimensions that directly impacted the lives of farmers, alongside changes to income distribution that prioritized welfare and political criteria over the amount of work performed.12