The Great Leap Forward famine
Between fifteen and forty-five million people starve because of policy.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 4 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Mao's campaign from 1958 to overtake Britain in steel output collectivises agriculture into communes, diverts labour to backyard furnaces producing useless metal, and enforces false grain reporting that leads to over-requisitioning. The resulting famine from 1959 to 1961 is the deadliest in recorded history, with estimates from 15 to 45 million dead. Grain continued to be exported. It is the clearest case of ideology overriding evidence at catastrophic scale.