The Great Leap Forward and the Famine

Until the early 1980s, little was known about the Great Leap Famine (1959–1962) that caused the deaths of 15 to 45 million Chinese. Mao Zedong’s campaign called the “Great Leap Forward” (1958–1961) (大跃进) aimed to transform China into a modern industrial nation and to prepare China for communism in the near future. However, the Great Leap resulted in one of the greatest disasters in history. In the three years that followed, a massive famine occurred. Serious academic demographic research started when the population census completed in 1982 became available. In the 1990s, political scientists and economists dominated the field of research. They tried to adopt Western theories of bureaucratic organizations and apply statistical models to understand the causes and progression of the Great Leap. The research in this period was strongly focused on the role of Mao Zedong and elite politics. In the 2000s, a new generation of scholars carried out research regarding the experiences of ordinary people and the famine at the village level. It became possible for foreign scholars to hold oral history interviews with survivors of the famine and get access to county archives. Substantial provincial and local variations regarding death rates and the radicalism of leaders were debated. While some books on the famine were banned on mainland China, memoirs of cadres, new biographies of party leaders, or collections of government documents could be published. In the last few years, the Great Leap Famine has become a hot topic and scholarly research has reached a broader Western audience. New archival histories have been published based on documents from provincial archives.