Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward

This study examines the origins of the Great Leap Forward (GLF), a programme of economic reform that must be considered one of the great tragedies of Communist China. While standard accounts interpret the GLF as chiefly the brainchild of Mao Zedong and as a radical rejection of more moderate reform proposals, Bachman proposes a provocative reinterpretation stressing the role of bureaucracy.