Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962

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“Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives."

So opens Frank Dikötter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era." Dikötter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,"--at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death--but also of "the greatest demolition of real estate in human history," as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble.

A Look Inside Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962
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Autumn 1955–Spring 1956: Mao, displeased with the slow pace of economic development, pushes for huge increases in the production of grain, cotton, coal and steel. November 1957: Mao visits Moscow. Impressed by the Soviet sputnik, the first satellite launched into orbit, he declares that the ‘East wind will prevail over the West wind’. Summer 1958: Farm collectives are amalgamated into gigantic people’s communes of up to 20,000 households. Famine conditions appear in many parts of the country.