try and ruling elite, making the communes and peasantry the vanguards of progress. This constituted China’s Great Leap Forward, an attempt by Mao and the State to unify the nation under a common goal in order to overthrow Great Britain and other European giants in agricultural production. Entire communities toiled vigorously in order to drastically increase China’s production output and demonstrate the nation’s growing prowess against the powers of the West. The Great Leap Forward, despite its disastrous failure which cost over 2 million lives, was a clear denouncement of individual freedom, instead raising the status of communities and ‘awarding’ collective freedom.In Mao’s era, there was also little room for free speech due to the immense censorship that pervaded the period. Individual thinking and Confucian philosophy were renounced with a youth movement, The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to criticize everything and to revive the spirit of the revolution. Until his death in 1976, when Deng Xiao Ping took control of the Communist Party, Mao accentuated maintaining the revolutionary ideals of communal ‘freedom’ and the ultimate sacrifice of the individual for the enhancement of China.Even prior to Deng’s ascension as leader of the Communist Party, there was criticism amongst the people and floating ideas of “less collectivity and more individual incentives” (Seybolt 59). When Deng Xiao Ping did rise to leadership, he transformed China into a force in the global community as he sought to strengthen China’s economic backbone at the risk of political insecurity. Deng’s advocacy of private ownership, added luxuries in everyday life, and a broadened capitalist approach greatly altered China’s political infrastructure. Deng’s philosophy gave the individual more power and direction in guiding his/her future. The collectivization system was aband...
