Full Description
Mao’s campaign to transform China through mass mobilisation into an industrial and agricultural superpower within years rather than decades. Peasants were organised into enormous People’s Communes, grain targets were set impossibly high, and rural labour was diverted to backyard steel furnaces producing mostly useless metal. The resulting famine — caused by exaggerated production reports, grain requisitioning from starving villages, and the destruction of agricultural capacity — killed between 15 and 55 million people, making it the deadliest man-made famine in history.
Critical Perspective
The Great Leap Forward famine was not a natural disaster or a policy failure born of ignorance — it was the product of a system in which truthful information could not flow upward through a hierarchy of fear. Local officials reported fictional harvests to meet targets; the state requisitioned grain that did not exist; and Mao, insulated from reality by his own ideology and the party’s culture of deception, continued the campaign for two years after the famine began. Frank Dikötter’s archival research has established that the scale of violence and coercion was even greater than previously understood.
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