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Great Leap Forward (1958-1962)
Mao's second Five-Year Plan, aiming to rapidly transform China into a modern industrial power through mass collectivisation and backyard steel production. It caused catastrophic economic disruption and a famine that killed an estimated tens of millions of people.
People's Communes
Large collective units combining farming, small-scale industry, and local administration, formed by merging agricultural cooperatives from 1958 onward as part of the Great Leap Forward; they ended private land ownership entirely.