The Great Leap

1950

The first years. The Party’s 1981 history lists what the new state did in its first three years, among them agrarian reform and the “suppressed counter-revolutionaries.” It gives no count. Historian Yang Kuisong writes that Mao later said 700,000 people were killed in that campaign, and traces the figure to a January 1954 report by the deputy minister of public security. In the printed text of his 1957 speech Mao gave no figure. He called the death sentences “absolutely necessary” and added that “good people were sometimes mistaken for bad.”

1958

The Leap. In 1958 the Party adopted a general line for building socialism. The Great Leap Forward and the rural people’s communes followed, which the Party’s 1981 history says began “without careful investigation and study and without prior experimentation.” Marshal Peng Dehuai, then defence minister, wrote that too many small blast furnaces had been built. He also wrote that “our achievements have been really great.”

25 Mar 1959

Shanghai, March 1959. In a 2010 newspaper article, Frank Dikötter writes that at a secret meeting in Shanghai Mao ordered the Party to procure up to a third of all the available grain, and that “he knew about the horror.” Ian Johnson writes that Yang Jisheng’s main point is that the Party, up to Mao, knew exactly what was going on. Cormac Ó Gráda, reviewing Dikötter’s book, reports that Mao’s physician “doubted that [Mao] really knew,” and that Mao was “visibly shaken” by reports from Xinyang in October 1960. This story has not seen the minutes, only Dikötter’s rendering of them.

14 Jul 1959

Lushan. On 14 July 1959, during a Party meeting at Lushan, Peng wrote Mao a letter. He praised the Leap’s gains, then listed its faults, among them “boasting and exaggeration” and an overestimated grain harvest. The Party’s 1981 history says Mao later “erred” in criticising Peng, and that the verdict against Peng and three others was “entirely wrong.” In Yang Jisheng’s account, as Ian Johnson summarises it, Mao purged Peng and his supporters, and officials in the provinces then copied the attack locally.

1959–1961

Xinyang. Yang Jisheng, a reporter for the Xinhua news agency, spent years piecing together the story of the famine. His book Tombstone appeared in Hong Kong in 2008 and, Ian Johnson wrote in 2012, remains banned on the mainland. Johnson calls Xinyang, in Henan, the epicentre. NPR reports that the post office there confiscated more than a thousand letters begging for help, and that people who tried to leave were sent to labour camps.

1962

Counting the dead. That people starved is not in dispute among these sources; the number is. Ó Gráda gives earlier demographers’ range as 18 to 32.5 million, and Dikötter says they worked from official census figures. Yang Jisheng estimates 36 million deaths from unnatural causes, which Johnson says includes government torture and murder, and NPR says grain exports continued. Dikötter’s “at least 45 million” adds fifty per cent to Cao Shuji’s 32.5 million, on archive-against-gazetteer discrepancies, and Ó Gráda objects that it assumes an “implausibly low” normal death rate. The Party’s 1981 history speaks of “serious losses” and gives no figure.

1961

Two explanations. Y. Y. Kueh found, Ó Gráda reports, that droughts and floods accounted for the bulk of the 1960 and 1961 shortfalls, but also that “even without natural disasters, the agricultural depression was inevitable.” The Party’s 1981 history says the difficulties of 1959 to 1961 were mainly due to the Leap’s errors and the campaign against “Right opportunism,” together with “a succession of natural calamities” and the Soviet government’s “perfidious scrapping of contracts.” The Soviet side’s answer was not found. Ó Gráda holds Mao responsible for the policies, while arguing that miscalculation is “not quite the same” as deliberately starving millions. Yang Jisheng writes of starvation “during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics.”

10 Mar 1959

Lhasa, March 1959. China’s State Council says some of Tibet’s ruling class “staged a full-scale armed rebellion,” which the central government “quelled”; it also says the CIA airdropped weapons to the rebels, a charge this story has not seen answered. The Dalai Lama’s office says that after “China’s invasion of Tibet” Chinese troops carried out a “brutal suppression” of a “national uprising” in Lhasa, and that he was “forced to escape into exile.” The Party’s 1981 history says Tibet was “peacefully liberated.” No count of the dead is given: counts exist, but this story could not read one it can stand behind.

May 1966

May 1966, and the Party’s verdict. The Party’s 1981 history says the Cultural Revolution brought “the most severe setback and the heaviest losses” since 1949. It says Mao initiated and led it, that chief responsibility “does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong,” and that Lin Biao and Jiang Qing committed crimes “behind his back.” It also judges that Mao’s “merits are primary and his errors secondary.” These are the Party’s words, not a finding by an outside body.

1968–1971

In the villages. Scholars Andrew Walder and Yang Su read 1,520 county annals published after 1987. Adjusting for annals that under-report, they estimate 750,000 to 1.5 million deaths in rural China, a similar number permanently injured, and 36 million persecuted. The abstract, the only part read for this story, says the vast majority of these casualties came from 1968 to 1971, after the period of popular rebellion and factional conflict had ended. Their count covers the countryside only.

4 Jun 1989

Spring and night, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a reform-minded Party leader, died on 15 April 1989, and students gathered in Tiananmen Square. On 26 April the People’s Daily blamed “an extremely small number of people with ulterior purposes” for “a planned conspiracy.” On 20 May the State Council under Premier Li Peng ordered martial law. On the night of 3 to 4 June a U.S. embassy cable reported troops opening fire in the square, and the cables also record demonstrators setting armoured vehicles on fire and besieging troops with rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails. The National Security Archive writes that U.S. diplomats concluded the army “had carried out a massacre ordered by top officials.”

30 Jun 1989

What Beijing said. On 6 June the State Council’s spokesman, Yuan Mu, said 300 people had died, including 23 students, and that 7,000 had been hurt, including 5,000 soldiers, with 400 soldiers missing. He later said he had denied only that anyone died when the army cleared the square itself; Hong Kong Free Press notes that many casualties occurred near Muxidi as the army approached. On 30 June Beijing’s mayor, Chen Xitong, said 200 had died, including 36 students. In 2019 Defence Minister Wei Fenghe said the government “was decisive in stopping the turbulence,” and Al Jazeera reports he defended it as the “correct policy.”

22 Jun 1989

Counts from outside. A State Department report of 4 June cited estimates of 500 to 2,600 deaths, and its morning summary had put those from the assault at 180 to 500. The embassy’s cable of 22 June said deaths probably stayed below 3,000 but “surely far outnumbered official figures,” put most of them on the avenues around the square, and called a Chinese Red Cross figure of 2,600 “not an unreasonable estimate.” AP reported in 1989 that some Red Cross officials gave 2,600 while Beijing’s Red Cross office refused to give any figures.

5 Jun 1989

Ten thousand. Hong Kong Free Press reports that Britain’s ambassador cabled London on 5 June that at least 10,000 civilians had died. The chain, as it reports it: an unnamed State Council member, a person whose name is redacted, then the ambassador, one day after. The cable also carried other claims. A figure of more than 10,000 was already being told to U.S. embassy officers by angry citizens on 4 June. This story has not seen the cable, and found no source it could read for any later, lower British figure. No count is agreed.

24 Nov 2019

Xinjiang, 2019. In November 2019 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the “China Cables,” leaked documents that, it says, include a manual for running the camps, approved by Zhu Hailun, then a senior Party official in Xinjiang. ICIJ says experts verified them, among them James Mulvenon of SOS International, who called them “very authentic.” The UN human rights office later said it could verify a number of such documents and found them highly likely to be authentic, but not all. The Chinese government called them “pure fabrication and fake news,” and its UK embassy said there are no “detention camps,” but training centres set up to prevent terrorism.

19 Jan 2021

“Genocide.” On 19 January 2021 U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo determined that “since at least March 2017” the PRC, “under the direction and control of the Chinese Communist Party,” had committed crimes against humanity, and that it had committed genocide, in Xinjiang. On 22 February the House of Commons of Canada passed an opposition motion 266 to 0 that recognised a genocide and called on the government to adopt that view; CBC reports the prime minister and almost all of the cabinet were absent, and Foreign Minister Marc Garneau abstained “on behalf of the Government of Canada.” On 22 April the UK House of Commons approved a non-binding motion, and RFE/RL reports the UK government says any decision on genocide is up to national and international courts. This story has not read the UK motion’s own words.

31 Aug 2022

The UN assessment. On 31 August 2022 the UN Human Rights Office published its assessment. It says the government’s laws led to “large-scale arbitrary deprivation of liberty” of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities in the centres and other facilities, at least between 2017 and 2019, and that the extent of that detention “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” It calls allegations of torture “credible” but cannot say how far they went, and records indications of coercive birth-control enforcement and of labour schemes that may involve coercion. It does not use the word genocide. The government says the centres have been closed since 2019; OHCHR says the laws behind them remain.

1 Sep 2022

China’s answer. Beijing rejects these charges. Its cover note to the UN, annexed to the assessment, speaks of “disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces” and says Xinjiang’s measures are “effectively curbing the frequent occurrences of terrorist activities”; OHCHR records the government’s account of thousands of attacks that killed many people and hundreds of police officers. Foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, as state broadcaster CGTN reports it, said more than 60 countries wrote to oppose the release, and that the report “stopped short of pushing such fallacies as genocide, forced labor, religious repression and forced sterilization.” China’s longer reply, the report that fills the rest of the annex, was not read for this story.

2019

The numbers. In 2021 China’s embassy said the Uygur population rose from 10.17 million to 12.72 million between 2010 and 2018. OHCHR gives the government’s census figures as 10 million in 2010 and 11.6 million in 2020, and this story cannot say why the two do not match. OHCHR also cites the official yearbook for the birth-rate fall, against 10.48 per thousand for all China, says Uyghur-majority areas account for the bulk of it, and calls the figures “unusual and stark.” It treats coercion as a separate finding, not as something the numbers prove.

28 Oct 2026

Now. On 22 January 2026 independent UN special rapporteurs, who say their views do not necessarily represent those of the UN, said there is “a persistent pattern of alleged State-imposed forced labour” involving ethnic minorities in China. Reuters reports that Beijing rejected the allegations as groundless. On 28 October 2026 the United States added three Chinese medical equipment makers to its forced-labour entity list, and the firms deny the charge. After an earlier round of listings on 31 July, China’s commerce ministry said there is “simply no such thing as so-called ‘forced labor’ in Xinjiang in any form.” The dispute is open.