Why Was Small Not Beautiful? Rethinking China’s Great Leap Forward through Water
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".