Editing Great Leap Forward (section)

===People's communes===
{{Main|People's commune}}
[[File:People's commone canteen3.jpg|thumb|A canteen in a people's commune, 1958]]
An experimental commune was established at Chayashan in [[Henan]] in April 1958. Here for the first time, private plots were entirely abolished and communal kitchens were introduced. At the [[Politburo of the Communist Party of China|Politburo]] meetings in August 1958, it was decided that these people's communes would become the new form of economic and political organization throughout rural China. By the end of the year, approximately 25,000 communes had been set up, with an average of 5,000 households each. The communes were relatively self-sufficient co-operatives where wages and money were replaced by work points.{{citation needed|date=July 2024}}

The commune system was aimed at maximizing production for provisioning the cities and constructing offices, factories, schools, and social insurance systems for urban-dwelling workers, cadres, and officials. Citizens in rural areas who criticized the system were labeled "dangerous". Later on, as more and more families linked together to form people's communes, peasants started to lose individual identities, since families were from vastly different communities with different cultural views, political views, family structures, and financial backgrounds, which created conflict regarding the means and modes of production. Some wealthier families who refused to join a people's commune might be labeled as rightists.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Cheng |first=Jingru |year=2022 |title=Collectivisation, paradox and resistance: The architecture of people's commune in china |journal=Journal of Architecture |volume=27 |issue=7–8 |pages=913–948 |doi=10.1080/13602365.2022.2158207 |doi-access=free}}</ref> Escape was also difficult or impossible, and those who attempted were subjected to "party-orchestrated public struggle", which further jeopardized their survival.{{sfnp|Thaxton|2008|p=3}} Besides agriculture, communes also incorporated some light industry and construction projects. Harvests did increase in 1958. However this was because of exceptional weather, not, which a lot of officials mistook, as the result of hard work of the peasants (collectivization lowered the efficiency of labour and increased overconsumption), causing officials to raise the projected quota. This led to famine in the countryside since they were required to reach set harvest goals, leaving not enough food for themselves.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard, Koen Rutten |title=From Accelerated Accumulation to Socialist Market Economy in China Economic Discourse and Development from 1953 to the Present |date=2017 |publisher=BRILL |isbn=9789004330092 |pages=34–36}}</ref>