The Great Chinese Famine is widely regarded as one of the greatest manmade disasters in human history. Although the death toll has been estimated between 15 and 55 million, demographic reconstructions indicate about 30 million people died between 1959 and 1961.

 

The Great Leap Forward was a huge effort by Mao Zedong to move China dramatically closer to the ideal Communist society imagined in Marxist doctrine. Mao believed that the heavy industrialization was the key to achieving this, and therefore made steel production the centerpiece of the Great Leap. Instead of working in the fields, peasants were transitioned to working in mines and factories. Peasants were forced to abandon all private food production in exchange for agricultural communes. Although record grain harvests were reported to demonstrate the superiority of communal farming, these reports were fabricated, and in reality agricultural communes dedicated far less land to grain. Since grain, at the time, was the source of 80% of China's food energy, by 1959, a third of China's provinces were in famine.

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The Great Leap Forward began to be repealed in 1960. The communal system was broken up and peasants returned to private agriculture. The Great Leap caused a division between the high radical and intermediate radical members of the Communist Party of China, where the latter group began to realize the importance of experts in developing the economy. Mao Zedong later launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 because he doubted the revolutionary commitment of these cadres.

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