Event · Twentieth century · China
Great Leap Forward
1958–1962
The campaign launched in 1958 under Mao's authority: forced collectivization, backyard steel, and the famine of 1959–1961. Death tolls are estimates and do not agree.
Facts
- Launched
- 1958
- Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Great Leap Forward
- Famine years
- 1959–1961
- Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Great Leap Forward
- Death toll
- Not a census. Dikötter argues for at least 45 million. Yang Jisheng's Tombstone puts the toll near 36 million. Official Chinese figures are lower. A commonly cited scholarly band runs from about 15 million to about 45 million.
- Source: Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine (2010); Yang Jisheng, Tombstone (2008)
The record
The Great Leap forced the countryside into large communes and pulled labor into steel production, including backyard furnaces. Grain was taken under inflated reports of the harvest. The famine followed.
Frank Dikötter, working from archives, argues the death toll was at least 45 million and that policy, not weather alone, produced it. Yang Jisheng, using provincial archives and interviews, puts the toll near 36 million. Official Chinese figures are lower. Historians who think the upper figure is too high still place the deaths in the tens of millions. The disagreement is printed here on purpose. A single number would be a lie of precision.
Connected
Links in both directions: what this page points to, and what points here.
Books
A history of the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward, built from provincial archives and interviews. It puts the death toll near 36 million.
Book noteAn archive-based history of the famine of the Great Leap Forward. It argues that at least 45 million people died, and that policy, not weather alone, produced the famine.
Book note
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