Great Leap Forward

And, you know, when there's a lot of money at stake, it's easy to, you know, tell everyone to shut up when it comes to human rights abuses.

They ignore the fact that that dictator that he did mention the name of, Mao, is responsible for the deaths of tens of millions through the Great Leap Forward, an internment of people, you know, public humiliation, executions, and just... brutal campaign of terror and it's it's a sad thing because when beijing has the power to control the speech of actors in other countries uh and then when the league comes out and they you know try to apologize and kowtow and do all these things to try to make amends for the statements of their players exercising their own rights because they come from free countries Nothing is going to ever end unless certain people have, you know, the gut, the grit, the determination to stand up and fight for what's right.

And we saw it with Einz Kander-Freedom, right? Enes Kander-Freedom.

Enes Kander-Freedom.

Holding water upstream could only be one part of managing the rivers that pass through the region.

During the Great Leap Forward, that disagreement affected the design of Suya Lake Reservoir.

Chern had proposed 12 outlet gates.

According to historical accounts, an official considered his design too conservative and reduced the number to five.

There was a benefit to retaining water for crops, but a reservoir receiving heavy rain also had to pass water on.

Chen's disagreement concerned that balance.

Banqiao already existed by then, having been completed years before the Great Leap Forward.

In 1961, however, officials sought out critics of the dam program.

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However, all of this changes in 1958, when Mao proclaims the beginning of the Great Leap Forward.

Although the Great Leap Forward has often been described as a government-led campaign to turn the People's Republic of China into a great power through mass industrialisation, it is actually a reorientation of the country's entire economic and political fabric.

communist ideas didn't work so well, and running the economy is rebuilding the country.

So by 1958, his position was a bit weaker, and he considered he had to do something.

Mao, trying to build the Chinese economy, he launched what was called the Great Leap Forward.

He found by 1958 that a lot of people in China weren't supporting him, didn't like communism, wanted to help the business community and so forth.

So he launched what was called the Great Leap Forward.

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.

Unlike the Soviet model, which focused on the development of heavy machinery, the Chinese chose to focus their efforts on human power rather than mechanical.

Some areas did better than others.

This was often down to the level of competency within local officials.

In Jiangxi, for example, officials had been firmly against the Great Leap Forward all along and purposefully dragged their feet when implementing it.

they saw a considerably lower number of deaths than in other parts of china other human factors included the widespread targeting of birds to prevent them from eating the new seeds which resulted in a huge increase in the vermin population and well guess what vermin like to eat then there was the encouragement to grow crops much closer to each other and further down in the absurd belief that the same species of plants would compete with one another as many keen horticulturalists will tell you that is absolutely bonkers even the same crops need a certain amount of space and the decision to overso fields proved disastrous then of course there were the natural causes that began with the worst flood the yellow river had seen since the 1930s in 1958 affecting over half a million acres of cultivated land The government valiantly recruited 2 million farm workers to participate in redirecting the flood water into the Baha'i Sea, which consequently meant that 2 million people were not in the fields desperately trying to make up their insane quota numbers, which led to vast amounts of crops simply rotting.

It's kind of every man for himself.

Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome type situation.

Like the Great Leap Forward type situation.

You've got nothing and the only thing you can do to not die or watch your family die around you slowly, the only thing you can do is steal it from your neighbours.

A nightmare, in other words.

Now, in fairness, not all of the collapse was attributed to killing the Kulaks or the Cultural Revolution, the case of Mao, but a lot of it was.

The Great Leap Forward also, a lot of it was.

A lot of it was caused, incidentally, by other mistakes that were just as stupid, and they were stupid for the very same reasons.

So it was stupidity that caused it.

Stalin caused famines that killed millions in Ukraine.

Mao's Great Leap Forward created a famine that killed tens of millions.

And Venezuela went from one of the richest countries in Latin America to a nation where millions have fled.

So each time the state got all the keys, all the control, the insiders did well, and the rest of the people starved.