The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine
Mao's campaign to overtake Britain in industry through mass mobilisation and communes causes the deadliest famine in recorded history, with tens of millions of excess deaths.
- Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 — Yang Jisheng, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012)
- Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 — Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury (2010)
- Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China — Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (1981)
- The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)
- Mao: A Life — Philip Short, Henry Holt (1999)
In 1958 Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, a campaign to make China an industrial power in a few years and, as slogans put it, to overtake Britain within fifteen years. Peasants were organised into vast people’s communes, with communal kitchens, and private plots were abolished. Millions were pulled from the fields to build dams or to smelt iron in backyard furnaces, often by melting down their own pots and tools.
- The Search for Modern China — Jonathan D. Spence, W. W. Norton (1990)
- Mao: A Life — Philip Short, Henry Holt (1999)
- Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 — Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury (2010)
How a famine was made
Local officials, under intense pressure, reported impossibly high harvests. The state then took grain based on these inflated figures, leaving villages with little or nothing, while China continued to export grain. Pseudo-scientific farming methods such as deep ploughing and close planting lowered yields. When Marshal Peng Dehuai criticised the policy at the Lushan conference in 1959, Mao purged him, and the campaign was intensified rather than reversed. Officials who reported hunger risked being labelled “rightists”.
- Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 — Yang Jisheng, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012)
- Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 — Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury (2010)
- Mao's Last Revolution — Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2006)
The result, between 1959 and 1961, was famine on a scale never recorded before. Provinces such as Anhui, Sichuan, Henan and Gansu were worst hit. Survivors’ accounts tell of people eating bark and grass, of villages emptied, and in some places of cannibalism. Violence by local cadres was widespread.
- Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 — Yang Jisheng, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012)
- Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 — Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury (2010)
How many died
There is no official figure. Demographers estimate the excess deaths from population data, and their results vary. Most scholarly estimates fall roughly between 15 and 45 million; many cluster around 30 million. Yang Jisheng, whose own father starved, put the toll at 36 million in Tombstone, based on years of research in Party archives; Frank Dikötter argues for at least 45 million.
- Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 — Yang Jisheng, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012)
- Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 — Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury (2010)
Silence and memory
In 1962 Liu Shaoqi told a Party conference the disaster was “three parts natural, seven parts man-made”. The Party’s 1981 resolution acknowledged grave errors but blamed them on leftism and natural calamities; textbooks call it the “three years of difficulty”. Tombstone is banned in mainland China, though it circulates in Hong Kong and online.
- Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China — Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (1981)
- Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 — Yang Jisheng, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012)
- Mao's Last Revolution — Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2006)
The famine weakened Mao’s standing and led to a period of recovery under Liu and Deng Xiaoping, which Mao would later avenge in the Cultural Revolution. Its memory lives mainly inside families: in a grandparent who cannot bear to throw away food, or in stories told once and not repeated.
- Mao's Last Revolution — Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2006)
- Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 — Yang Jisheng, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012)
The Party's 1981 resolution calls the Great Leap a serious error caused by "left" mistakes, boastfulness and the "communist wind", worsened by natural disasters and the Soviet withdrawal of aid. It gives no death toll.
- Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China — Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (1981)
The famine was man-made: grain was requisitioned on the basis of false harvest reports and exported while villagers starved, and those who spoke up were purged. Estimates of excess deaths range from about 15 million to 45 million or more; Yang Jisheng, a former Xinhua journalist, estimates 36 million, and Frank Dikötter at least 45 million.
- Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 — Yang Jisheng, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012)
- Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 — Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury (2010)
- Mao's Last Revolution — Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2006)
Why it matters today
Almost every rural family over a certain age has a memory of hunger from these years, but the famine is rarely discussed publicly in China and is still officially called the "three years of difficulty". The memory helps explain older Chinese people's attitude to food, waste and saving, and why stability and full rice bowls matter so much.