Documentary: Mao's Great Famine

The Great Leap Forward intended to transform China into an industrial economy faster than any other country had done before, relying on the Stalinist model of forced colectivization of farms (many of them just recently taken from landlords, broken up and given by the State to peasants) and the State takeover of all private property, including cattle and homes. 

Peasants were forced to work on these now State-owned collective farms, organized in communes directed by all-powerful cadres from the Communist Party. They had to live in those communes, separated by sex, families torn apart. Work in the communes is hard, meassured by unrealistic targets and sometimes paid not in money, but in "work points". Soon, communes would also turn barracks, when military training was made mandatory.


Since cadres were selected on political and not technical bases, the farms were badly managed, and the farmers felt little motivation to work in what was really forced labor. Cradres had total power over the people. They decided who would eat and who wouldn't. As the communes faked their harvest results to meet the unrealistic goals set by the Party, the State took a larger share than intended (as it was a % calculated on an inflated production volume) and their targets were raised for the next term. 

The real catastrophe came when Mao tried to reach his wild dreams of making China an industrial society, commited to beat the United Kingdom in steel production. To do that, he commanded the entire population to generate steel in small blast furnaces, melting even their cooking ware. That resulted in yet lower food production, and all this effort was wasted anyway, since the metal produced in this local furnaces was of useless quality and therefore had no value.

So in the end, agricultural production was poor, and most of this food was confiscated by the State, or not properly distributed by the cadres. Peasants starved to death in many regions. Grain was used to pay China's debt with the Soviet Union instead of feeding those that had harvested it. People resorted to "eating" mud and finally, to cannibalism.

Worse of all: Starvation was part of the plan of Chairman Mao. As reveals a document from the Politburo sesion of March 25th, 1959, "when there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. Is better to let half the people die, so that the other half can eat their fill". And that very same day Mao orders to rise the procurements of grain, up to 1/3 of the production, stating that "if you take a third of the grain, the farmers will not rebel". So, the cities live, the farmland dies, that was the plan. Cities were closed, off-limits for people from the countryside.

There are official documents also proving that the Communist Party knew about the widespread famine. Most of these come from the investigations led by then-President Liu Shaoqi, who by exposing the tragedy the Great Leap Forward was produzing, managed to put a stop to it in 1962, and conditions immediately improved. Liu would later be vilified, tortured and killed under orders from Mao during the Cultural Revolution, in 1969.