Great Leap Forward

Proper noun

the Great Leap Forward

1. (historical) A vast economic and social plan lasting from 1958 to 1961 which aimed to use the Chinese population to rapidly transform the Communist China from a primarily agrarian economy by peasant farmers into a modern communist society through agriculturalization and industrialization, but failed disastrously (resulting in massive famine and the deaths of many millions of people).
   • Louti, in Hunan Province, Central China, is one of the numerous small industrial cities that have grown up since liberation, particularly since the big leap forward.[1960, Survey of China Mainland Press, numbers 2308-2328, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 30
   • In the early 1960s, following the collapse of Mao's Great Leap Forward, Liu and Chang, as party officials in the city of I-pin (120 miles south of Szechwan's capital, Chengtu), vigorously prosecuted those cadres under their jurisdiction who had shown less than wholehearted devotion to that campaign.1971, Thomas Jay Matthews, “The Cultural Revolution in Szechwan”, in The Cultural Revolution in the Provinces, Harvard University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 96
2. A theoretical point in human evolution at which point complex tools, weapons, sculptures, etc. began to appear, supplanting previous primitive behaviour.