Great Chinese Famine

Then you have anti-rightist campaigns, cultural revolution, where Mao is churning things so that he remains in power.

Oh, and while all that's going on, you have the Great Famine, which is created by his great leap forward, keeps exporting food because that's where he gets his pocket change and people are starving.

So after that, you think the Chinese want any more wars? Right? They want to chill out of this thing for a while.

But basically, all those people who did all that fighting and might have a sense that maybe you don't want to do any more of that, they're all dead.

But you don't need to go that far back.

To find a really different kind of China, between 1920 and 1961, five famines ravaged either individual areas of China or the entire country, with the final, known rather ominously as the Great Chinese Famine, proving to be the most catastrophic.

It's difficult to be sure how many people died during this period, but the final five famines seen in China are thought to have caused between 40 and 65 million deaths.

The reasons behind them are wide-ranging and include environmental factors such as drought, typhoons, and floods.

Some argued it was the central nationalist government's fault, while others pointed the finger at local officials who were reported to be still frequently feasting on the kind of food you'd expect to see at a Western dinner table in the 21st century.

The communists, of course, blamed the nationalists, while both also pointed their finger at the invading Japanese force as the cause of everything.

if this had been the first time famine had hit china it might well have been successfully blamed on the foreigners but as we've seen this was far from an isolated incident so we come to the nadir of hell the catastrophe to end all catastrophes the peace de resistance of calamitous human activity the great chinese famine that rocked the country between 1959 and 1961 is widely considered the worst famine of all time and was a direct result of one of the largest and worst economic and social campaigns in history known as the great leap forward Like many disastrous economic initiatives, the Great Leap Forward at least came with good, albeit horribly, implemented intentions.

The concept, not surprisingly considering the word LEAP is in the title, was essentially to vault the economy forward.

That's how I came up with the estimate.

Frank Decoder used the same extrapolation methods to estimate the total number of people that were starved to death in Mao's Great Famine.

And when, I guess it was Deng Xiaoping when he opened up China, Frank Decoder was able to go through the countryside, gather statistics like you did from the hospitals, and extrapolated that somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 to 65 million people were starved to death during the Great Famine.

So that's how I made the estimate.

The CCP simply established a new political regime.

The three-year-long Great Famine was called Three Years of Natural Disaster, when in fact it was not at all a natural disaster, but rather a completely man-made calamity.

However, upon hearing these words used in everyday life and being imperceptibly influenced by them, people unconsciously accepted the ideologies that the CCP intended to instill in them.

The CCP also abused religious vocabulary and distorted the meanings of those terms.

The government took too much food for the cities, even as agricultural production declined.

These policies contributed directly to what is referred to as the Great Chinese Famine, which caused 40 million deaths, making it the deadliest famine on record.

Total deaths from all of Mao's communist policies range from 70 to 80 million.

China also had these struggle sessions where if you were, especially if you were a professor, if you were in the intelligentsia, or if you were just a person and someone's neighbor who was found out to be questioning the socialist communist regime, you would be taken out, you'd be flogged, you'd be shamed.