Primary Sources: China: Great Leap Forward

"In an effort to transform China's agrarian economy into an industrialized communist society, the Chinese Communist Party passed the "General Line of the Great Leap Forward" on May 1958 and began the people’s commune movement and the drive to increase steel production. Ultimately a failed political campaign, the Great Leap Forward led to the deaths of millions of people across China."

"The Memory Project Oral History collection comprises digital video recordings and written supporting documentation of interviews spanning 2009 to 2016. The interviews were conducted by filmmakers associated with the Work Station, a film studio run by Wu Wenguang in Caochangdi, Beijing, China. Memory Project interviews were conducted with Chinese people about mid-20th century rural life, primarily experiences during the Great Famine (1958-1961), but also the Land Reform and Collectivization (1949-1953), the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), the Four Cleanups Movement (1964), and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Wu's studio in suburban Beijing, known as the Work Station, is the home for this project. More than 150 young filmmakers have joined the project, and since 2010 they have visited 246 villages in 20 provinces and interviewed more than 1,100 elderly villagers. These filmmakers, many of whom returned to their families' rural hometowns, developed new intergenerational relationships with elderly relatives. During the process of interviewing the villagers, they reconciled the official history taught in schools with each family's experiences."