The Great Leap into Famine

The Great Leap Forward was launched in 1958 as a simultaneous campaign to rapidly industrialize China and collectivize its agricultural production. Mao believed China could overtake Britain's steel production within fifteen years. He ordered peasants across China to abandon traditional farming and produce steel in backyard furnaces, melting down their farming tools and kitchen implements in the process. Agricultural production collapsed. C2

The political system that surrounded the Great Leap Forward made the famine catastrophically worse. Local cadres — Communist Party officials at the village and county level — were under intense pressure to report production successes. Those who reported failure risked denunciation as "rightists," losing their positions, imprisonment, or worse. The rational response, within this system, was to falsify production figures. C1 C2 Falsified figures meant that grain quotas continued to be collected from communities that had nothing left to eat. Grain continued to be exported — the People's Republic needed foreign exchange and the propaganda value of not admitting famine — while the peasants who grew it starved. C2

Historian Frank Dikötter, who accessed provincial and county archives from this period in China, documents that local officials were sometimes aware of the deaths around them and continued enforcing grain quotas regardless — not from sadism but from the rational calculation that admitting the truth posed greater personal risk than continuing the policy. C2 The famine killed somewhere between 30 and 45 million people between 1959 and 1962. The precise figure cannot be established because the records were deliberately obscured and because Chinese archives remain partially closed. C2

In 1959, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai wrote Mao a private letter describing what he had seen in the countryside — honest reporting of the famine's reality. Mao responded by having Peng removed from his position, publicly denounced, and eventually imprisoned. C1 The message to every other official in China was unambiguous: tell the truth and face destruction. The famine continued for three more years.

By the mid-1960s, Mao's authority within the CCP had been diminished by the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward. More pragmatic leaders — Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping — had effectively managed economic recovery but had done so by retreating from Maoist orthodoxy. Mao, facing marginalization within the Party leadership, responded by going over the Party's head to the population. C2

The Cultural Revolution launched in 1966 mobilized millions of young Red Guards to attack the "Four Olds" — old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. Temples, libraries, universities, and historical sites were destroyed. Intellectuals, teachers, professors, doctors, and artists were denounced, publicly humiliated, imprisoned, and killed. An estimated 1 to 2 million people died directly. Tens of millions were persecuted, sent to labor camps, or subjected to forced "re-education." C2

Universities were closed for years. A generation of educated Chinese was lost to the labor camps or driven into exile or silence. Cultural artifacts of inestimable historical value were destroyed. The mechanism was the same as the Great Leap Forward: Mao created a political environment in which the cost of restraint exceeded the cost of violence, and ordinary people made the rational calculation accordingly. LI