I think a good place to start is to look at what factors shaped agricultural policy during the Great Leap Forward.
Prior to the generalized acceptance of Darwinian evolution, Lamarckian evolution (the belief that organisms changed within their lives due to their behavior, and this change is what was inherited) was still considered a valid scientific theory. This lasted until the early 1900s, when the discovery of genetics in the west provided a mechanism for which natural selection could occur.
Unfortunately, it took a while longer to become a universal truth in the eastern hemisphere. After the collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union, crop yields plummeted, and an attempt was made to find people offering solutions. At the time, the USSR was very ideologically committed to filling positions of Soviet hierarchy from the proletariat class, and the decision was made to look for solutions from elements of their uneducated rural population.
One of the people brought onboard was an illiterate, rural farmboy named Trofim Lysenko. Despite science progressively moving further and further away towards Mendelian genetics, Lysenko became dedicated to studying Lamarckian-style evolution throughout his entire career.
Lysenko had early success in discovering vernalization, the process by which freezing certain plants induces flowering. This discovery made him famous across the USSR and cemented him as a leading Soviet thinker.
Unfortunately, this early success gave widespread credit to his much more questionable and even harmful ideas. One of his biggest advocations was a disbelief in the science of natural selection, considering it anti-socialist, and instead suggested a theory that plants have an inherent desire to grow and cooperate. This theory was very attractive to the communist party, and he quickly rose to the rank of the Director of Genetics for the Soviet Academy of Science.
For example, Lysenko believed that if seeds were grouped clumped together in piles, rather than spaced out, they would better cooperate and grow.
These policies were obviously disastrous, but the dysfunctional and authoritarian nature of the USSR meant critics were silenced or killed, and so the reality of the failure of these policies did not reach government leaders.
After Kruskhev's liberalization of the country following the death of Stalin, critics were once again allowed to speak out, and he was finally discredited.
Unfortunately, one of his staunchest believers was Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong greatly respected his ideas and used his policies as the framing for his agricultural plan during the Great Leap Forward. Lysenko's policies, along with the eradication of sparrows leading to the mass propagation of crop-destroying locusts, along with a few other factors, caused unfathomable and devastating losses of crops. Local governments, fearing reprisal, refused to report these realities, and instead continued to claim successful and even surplus yields. This allowed the central government to stay (willfully) ignorant and in support of these policies, and to refuse to take any major safeguards to protect against famine.
This led to the Great Chinese Famine between 1959 and 1961, in which tens of millions starved, a direct result of Lysenko's nonscientific theories. Theories which, by then, had become firmly refuted in the wider scientific community, even to a large extent within the Soviet Union.
So in the case of Mao Zedong's level of "reasonability" regarding the management of his nation's food supply, he dedicated the country to discredited theories that led to mass starvation.
Here are a few sources for further reading:
DeJong-Lambert, William, and Krement︠s︡ov N. L. The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Yang, Dali L. Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford, 1996.
The premise of the question is somewhat difficult to address, reason is subjective and we in 2022 have the privilege of looking back at the disastrous and devastating implementations of ambitious yet poorly executed campaigns. I'll briefly examine the Great Leap Forward in this answer. In the formative and younger years of the Chinese Communist state, these policies had grand intentions to transform China from a poor, war-stricken country into a Socialist and Communist utopian society. In the early years when enthusiasm for new prospects was high, the goals may have seemed achievable, but the demands were indeed high.
The situation across China for the party posed many problems that needed to be addressed: security, poverty, income inequality, education, literacy, healthcare and sanitation, food, industrialization, resource management, etc. With the participation of workers and peasants in the War of Resistance and Civil War, the new Communist state now needed to transition from wartime governance to state building and consolidation. Though victorious in the Civil War, challenges arose in the implementation of Communism into society. The Korean War for example helped rally the country against western imperialism and affirm Communist strength and capacity. Steps taken in the first ten years after the 1949 establishment of the People's Republic saw raised standards in public health, hygiene, infant mortality.
By 1958 the country was relatively stable and peaceful, as was economic growth. It was under this basis that Mao and other leaders saw to accelerate their goals and revitalize the Communist project. Striving for modernity to keep up with the Soviet Union and Western Powers, rapid industrialization and social reorganization would prove the viability and success of the Chinese Communist state. Looking to distance themselves away from the Soviet model, the Chinese policies shifted towards a decentralized system with more responsibility for provincial and lower level governments. Not only would China modernize and industrialize, it would resolve long standing issues of food security and social impoverishment. No utopian vision would be established.
Initially things were optimistic and vibrant. The 1958 harvest yielded good results, and the masses were jubilant to engage in the campaign. Supervisors were empowered and stimulated to continue at a greater pace. When failure and famine struck, there was no efficient system in place to properly meet the needs of everyone. Radical policies were mitigated, but poor management resulted in mass humanitarian loss.
The campaign was seen as a solution to bridge the rural and urban labor divides. Communes were set up and rationing was replaced with public dining houses, where it was famously declared that one could eat as much as they pleased. These promises were naturally welcomed by the cadres and peasants in the impoverished countryside, but the reliance on the commune system for food security erased the possibility of self-sufficiency. This meant that when the resource and food allocations collapsed, there were no alternatives to acquire basic necessities. The strict management of the communes and the need for cadres to meet the demands of local, provincial, and ultimately state quotas meant they had to choose between immediate community needs or official policies and rules. The uneven distribution of food to urban centers and military personnel meant the peasants suffered the most and received the fewest aid. The absence of organized safety nets forced peasants to rely on connections with rural cadres or personnel connected to the supplies, the exchange of favors and discreet transactions(these often times took advantage of women with sexual intercourse and rape for rations), outright theft from communal stocks, or scavenging for food. Local cadres and production teams could also deliberately underreport harvest yields, though this brought considerable risk to all involved.
Furthermore, the continued demands from the central government meant peasants would be working harder at lower nutritional capacity. With less energy and ability more time was also spent on searching for or stealing food, further reducing productivity levels. Women especially were burdened, not only were they expected to participate fully in the workforce, they had family responsibilities for the young and elderly, picking up the slack where the welfare system lacked.
On top of food production, peasants were forced to give away many personal possessions and tools for the commune. Especially common were kitchen implements and metal objects that were to be melted down to produce steel. The idea was that the commune would provide the cooking and appliances, and that the peasants only needed to work and contribute. It can be said the expectation that undereducated and poorly equipped peasants could produce functional and serviceable steel was unreasonable. The villages simply had too little knowledge and resources to produce little more than pig iron. There was a lack of adequate preparation and education to bring about the idealized production.
While peasants and cadres may have been initially willing to engage in these policies, the central government and the media apparatus only spurred and encouraged such action, promising that the communist envision was achievable and that radicalism was feasible. Such expectations only placed greater pressure on cadres to report high outcomes, proving that their workforce had not only energetically followed state orders but exceeded them.
When examiners were dispatched from Peking and Remin Universities to review progress in Hebei and Henan communes, they found disaster in the epicenter of the famine. Starvation was rampant, with peasants having little energy to work the fields and contribute to production. As the famine and deteriorating situation became apparent, early in 1959 there was some rectification in pulling back the radical policies by central government. However, internal political faction struggles prevented a full reversal. Peng Dehuai and supporters criticized these rash and unrealistic policies, which threatened Mao's authority and legitimacy. In response the critical faction was dismissed and the central government resolved to purge itself of "rightist" elements. Cadres and officials were dismissed en masse, beyond the 1% removal quota. Reports criticizing the policies were suppressed and the reporters punished and disgraced. Deaths and negative news were underreported and the situation would officially appear more stable than in reality. This stalled relief, resulting in the rural countryside and peasants suffering the most. Prioritized were the industrial production areas in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Liaoning province, and those that received the largest distribution were military, industry workers, and intellectuals. Regions that produced grain surplus fared worse than grain deficit regions. The fertile and agriculturally rich regions of Anhui, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Henan, and Sichuan saw disproportionately greater exports, and so the peasants received less than those in Qinghai, Gansu, Xinjiang, Guizhou, Guangxi, Tibet, and other poorer or periphery areas.
The focus on peasants and industrial workers meant that the number of service workers declined as labor was transferred to other sectors. Diminished service workers did not mean less demand, rather, workers in the service industry served twice as many people and worked harder than before. Shortages of consumer products in 1959 were so prevalent that lengthy queues formed for even basic essential goods. The party chose to use propaganda and narratives to shed positive light onto the queues, rather than increase production. Shortages were blamed on hoarding and as individual problems, redirecting blame away from the state. While shortages and queues persisted, policies continued to favor rapid industrial accumulation. Reappointment of workers from the service sector to the industrial sector meant older, sicker, weaker, and inexperienced workers were drawn to replace them. As a result, service workers were unmotivated and unwelcoming, and pilfering and black market trade grew. Furthermore, the number of shops and restaurants drastically reduced both in cities and the countryside. Mass campaigns were launched to improve service quality and to encourage people to be frugal. The underlying message however emphasized self-sacrifice that justified the extraction and allocation of resources to industrial production. Whatever the case, a decline in services and commodities is tolerable compared to starvation and death in the countryside.
The illusion of progress meant local governments were unwilling to address the famine, and so the central government continued its unsustainable demands. Spurred by appeasement, production and grain yields were exaggerated. Traditionally the local and provincial cadres were blamed for corruption and underreporting death and famine, yet the central government only continued to promote the policies, share misleading progressive news, suppress critical "right" voices, and mismanage allocation and relief. Initially, the policies seemed reasonable and achievable. A stable country and good grain harvests promised a sustainable system. But the lack of preparation, backup and alternative support, and the rushed and inaccurate reporting of progress meant these policies went beyond levels of reason and into delusion and corruption.
This is a really complex question with a complex answer.
First, it has to pointed out that the Communist Party of China is a strongly ideological organization, and it was even more so in Mao Zedong’s era. Having an ideology is not necessarily wrong, but it inherently entails favoring certain concepts while discounting others. As such, people who do not hold an equivalent or similar ideology will find decisions made by an ideological group to be less rational. However, most people perceive themselves as rational decision-makers, and that includes highly ideological people. In fact, much of the time, people hold an ideology because they believe it to be the most rational worldview. As a result of all this, defining whether a decision was “reasonable” is usually at least a bit subjective. This is a large reason why you can often find very long winded arguments over whether certain historical or current figures were/are “rational actors”, or whether historical decisions “made sense at the time”. I will try to be as fair in my analysis as possible, but keep these concepts in mind.
Rather than address these policies as a single topic, I think it’s better to discuss them individually. After all, not all decisions are made in the same way. I’m going to discuss the Great Leap Forward, as there is more historical consensus on this campaign and its consequences than the One Child Policy (which also only ended after this sub’s -20 year limit), and because the Four Pests Campaign was actually a component of the Great Leap Forward.
The Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward was not a single policy, rather, it was a multifaceted campaign that sought to dramatically transform the Chinese economy. Broadly speaking, main goals of the campaign were rural collectivization and industrialization.
The desire to achieve these goals was both practical and ideological. The Communist rise to power had been greatly aided by support from the rural peasantry. Landlords (as well as more wealthy farmers lumped in with them) had their holdings seized and redistributed to the peasantry; they were also massacred in huge numbers. Land redistribution was popular with the peasantry, but was actually seen as something of an interim step by most party officials. After all, private enterprise was seen as antithetical to the goals of communism, and independent farming is a type of private enterprise. Thus, there was an ideological desire to reorganize the agricultural system into one based on communes, where all the land would be held collectively rather than divided among them.
The practical side of the equation was to increase state control over agricultural production and the rural population. By reorganizing people into communes, they lost their independence and became reliant on the government. Since communes were part of local government and party structures, it was also a de facto nationalization of agriculture. This would allow the state to direct agricultural sector to better achieve state goals.
In particular, Mao Zedong hoped to increase agricultural production and use the proceeds to accelerate industrialization. Though a full Sino-Soviet split had not yet occurred, Mao was already becoming somewhat suspicious and anxious about the Soviet Union, and this fueled a desire to increase the pace of industrial development.
On the surface, this proposal seems rational, albeit oppressive. However, the campaign proved to be disastrous. This was due in part to unforeseen consequences, but it was also the result of consequences that can be and, in fact, were foreseen. Unfortunately, these consequences were ignored due to to the irrational decision making and leaps of logic by many many in the Communist Party, principally, Mao Zedong himself.
To help meet industrialization goals of boosting steel production, the campaign promoted the construction of “backyard furnaces”. These many small, village-level projects were supposed to all add up, producing a significant amount of steel. This was a predictable failure. Villages often lacked the iron ore, fuel, and labor to sustain production. This resulted in tools being used for scrap, deforestation to provide fuel, and workers being redirected from the fields to work the furnaces. Most farmers lacked the knowledge to produce good-quality steel, especially using this low-quality production method. The result was large amounts of investment for negligible gains. Again, this was all rather predictable, but Mao endorsed the furnaces anyway, as they suited his ideology and provided an illusory method to reach his overoptimistic goals.
Meanwhile, collectivization also did not produce as large gains in agricultural production as promised. Some of the causes were:
Despite all these problems, which significantly reduced agricultural production, there was still enough food to feed everyone, had it been distributed right. There need not have been a famine. Instead, between 15-55 million people starved to death.
This was due to the political system of China at the time. In order to meet the unrealistic goals set by Mao and other party leaders, officials procured huge amounts of grain and left peasants with little or nothing to feed themselves. The system was too corrupt, inefficient, and lacking in transparency to redistribute the seized grain to stop famine (and, after all, the purpose of the program in the first place was not to feed the people, but to use agricultural proceeds for industrial development). Party officials, who craved promotion and recognition, feared punishment for failure, or both, outright fabricated data to paint an optimistic picture. As such, higher officials who might’ve had the power to redistribute food and save lives sometimes didn’t grasp the severity of the problem.
Finally was Mao himself. In addition to his overoptimistic vision, he was fostering a cult of personality that encouraged the aforementioned sycophancy and dishonesty. When people did criticize him or his policies, he reacted with hostility and authoritarianism. The most infamous example came from the July 1959 Lushan Conference. Marshal Peng Dehuai, commander of the People’s Liberation Army, wrote a private letter to Mao criticizing some aspects of the Great Leap Forward. Mao then passed the letter around at the conference, asking other officials for their opinions. Afterwards, Peng and those who had supported him were stripped of their positions, and some were imprisoned.
With all these aspects taken together, I believe it is fair to characterize the Great Leap Forward as being irrational in many respects. The desires to increase agricultural production, accelerate industrialization, and cement Party’s authority were all rational (though not necessarily wise or moral), but the scale of the goals was unrealistic and the methods of attempting to reach them were often irrational. This was compounded by Mao’s personality cult and hostility to criticism, both of which were irrational and made addressing the problems resulting from the campaign much more difficult.