Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Demographers have used official census figures to estimate that 20 million to 30 million people died.

In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961.

Rather than engage with the competing assumptions behind these numbers, Dikötter selects Cao Shuji’s estimate of 32.5 million and then adds fifty per cent to it on the basis of discrepancies between archival reports and gazetteer data, thereby generating a minimum total of 45 million excess deaths.

Frank Dikötter’s Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most

It is hardly surprising, then, that MGF’s brief account (pp. 324-34) of the famine’s death toll arrives at a figure far beyond the range of between 18 million and 32.5 million proposed hitherto by specialist demographers

Much hinges on what ‘normal’ mortality rates are assumed, since the archives do not distinguish between normal and crisis mortality.

It is highly unlikely that the Communists could have reduced it within less than a decade to the implausibly low 10 per thousand adopted here