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The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people's communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation's planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests campaign ...
The agricultural policies of the Great Leap Forward and the associated famine continued until January 1961, when, at the Ninth Plenum of the 8th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the restoration of agricultural production through a reversal of the Great Leap policies was started. Grain exports were stopped, and imports from ...
The Great Leap Forward, begun in 1958, was a campaign to rapidly modernize by using China's vast labor resources in agricultural and industrial projects. The Leap instead resulted in economic destruction and tens of millions of famine deaths, and had been mostly abandoned by early 1962.
The resulting agricultural failures, compounded by misguided policies of the Great Leap Forward, triggered a severe famine from 1958 to 1962. The death toll from starvation during this period reached 20 to 30 million people, [ 16 ] underscoring the high human cost of the ecological mismanagement inherent in the "Four Pests" campaign.
The largest famine of the 20th century was the 1958–1961 famine associated with the Great Leap Forward in China. The immediate causes of this famine lay in Mao Zedong's ill-fated attempt to transform China from an agricultural nation to an industrial power in one huge leap.
The Great Leap Forward, similar to the Five-year plans of the Soviet Union, was Mao Zedong's proposal to make the newly created People's Republic of China an industrial superpower. Beginning in 1958, the Great Leap Forward did produce, at least on the surface, incredible industrialization, but also caused the Great Chinese Famine , while still ...
The overall result of the Great Leap Forward was an actual, albeit temporary, shrinking of the Chinese economy. However, from 1952 to 1978 GDP per capita grew at an average rate of 3.6%, outpacing inflation. Another trend from The Great Leap Forward, was the steady decline of those employed in the agricultural sector, as the industrial sector grew.
Although land reform is an important social revolution, it has come at a great cost, causing significant rifts and internal strife within rural communities. According to surveys [ 100 ] conducted in 23 villages in Hebei and Chahar , the speed of transition from poor tenant farmers to middle farmers was rapid after land reform.