Why Was Small Not Beautiful? Rethinking China's Great Leap Forward through Water

Utilizing both ministerial records at the national level and local archival documents from Lankao County, Henan Province, this article examines how small-scale water projects turned into environmental disasters during the Great Leap Forward (1958-62). Previous scholarship has often regarded the Great Leap water policy, namely, the Three Priorities (water storage, small scale, and mass based), as a testimony to the irrationality of Maoist mass mobilization. This article, by contrast, interprets the Maoist technological complex as a troubled marriage between two variants of developmentalism: the high-modernist pursuit of productivism and scientific rationality (water storage) and the Maoist faith in decentralized mass initiatives (small-scale, situated, local projects). The article argues that Maoist water politics were undone by their internal contradictions, because high-modernist centralism undermined populist, revolutionary mass activism-a conflict that extended beyond hydrological engineering and weakened Mao's revolution as a whole.