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First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957)
China's first major economic planning program, modelled on Soviet central planning. It prioritised heavy industry (steel, coal, machinery) over agriculture and consumer goods, following Soviet advice and with substantial Soviet technical assistance. The First Five-Year Plan achieved strong industrial growth — steel output more than tripled — but the emphasis on heavy industry at the expense of agriculture laid the groundwork for the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward.
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.