Examiner’s Specific Advice

This question is testing several skills and also your knowledge of the topic. Because the question is on an important topic, you are expected to know the main details. You are also being required to provide an historical explanation and make a substantiated judgement.

As always with an essay type question, relevance is the key – your answer can be reasonably concise as long as you address the precise question. Relevance is more important than elegance of style.

The key thing is not to narrate and describe, but to keep the precise question in mind. Keep the focus on the reasons why the Great Leap Forward failed and try to identify a range of different reasons. Consider the reaction of the peasants to the Great Leap Forward and to what extent, if any, peasant resistance caused the failure of this experiment. Consider, also, the many other reasons why the Great Leap Forward failed.

Most importantly, whatever the approach, do make a judgement about the relative importance of the various causes of the failure, either with a concluding paragraph or throughout the essay.

You might find it advisable for an essay type answer of this sort to have a plan, since you will almost certainly be writing several paragraphs.

Exemplar Question

2 (04) ‘The Great Leap Forward failed because Mao over-estimated the revolutionary enthusiasm of the Chinese peasants.’

Explain why you agree or disagree with this view. [24 marks]

Plan

• Introduction – failure of GLF due to a range of different factors.
• How did peasants respond to GLF and to what extent did they contribute to its failure?
• Other factors which contributed to failure:
  • poor science (Four Noes, Lysenko)
  • waste of resources (human, materials, etc.)
  • dispute with USSR, withdrawal of Soviet experts
  • bad weather
  • the failure of the political system.
• Conclusion – how important was peasant resistance in failure of GLF?

 

View Exemplar Answer 1

View Exemplar Answer 2