Great Leap Forward

At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before.

When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.

He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.

His main point is to prove that the Party, from the village chief up to Chairman Mao, knew exactly what was going on but was too warped by ideology to change course until tens of millions had died.

Finding no natural causes, Yang lays the deaths at the feet of China’s totalitarian Communist system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.

a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics.

Comrade Mao Zedong and many leading comrades, both at the centre and in the localities, had become smug about their successes, were impatient for quick results and overestimated the role of man’s subjective will and efforts.

In 1958, the Second Plenum of the Eighth National Congress of the Party adopted the general line for socialist construction.

After the general line was formulated, the Great Leap Forward and the movement for rural people’s communes were initiated without careful investigation and study and without prior experimentation.

a succession of natural calamities and the perfidious scrapping of contracts by the Soviet Government that our economy encountered serious difficulties between 1959 and 1961

led the whole Party in energetically rectifying the errors which had already been recognized

It was mainly due to the errors of the Great Leap Forward and of the struggle against “Right opportunism” together with a succession of natural calamities and the perfidious scrapping of contracts by the Soviet Government that our economy encountered serious difficulties between 1959 and 1961

which caused serious losses to our country and people.

None of this absolves Mao from responsibility for the policies that caused the greatest famine ever. But reckless miscalculation and culpable ignorance are not quite the same as deliberately or knowingly starving millions

The role of the weather in 1959-61 remains contested.

Y. Y. Kueh found that droughts and flooding accounted for the bulk of the shortfalls in 1960 and 1961, although he also insisted ‘even without natural disasters, the agricultural depression was inevitable’