Between the winter of 1958 and the spring of 1961, it is variously estimated that between 16.5 and 45 million Chinese living in rural areas died of starvation and related illnesses, a cataclysm now known as the Great Famine. Its onset coincided with the start of Chairman Mao Zedong’s national development plan, the Great Leap Forward. Today, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) refers to this period as the ‘Three Years of Natural Disasters’.
In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, the CCP had a different explanation. At that time, the association between Mao’s Great Leap and the Famine was undeniable, but the CCP deflected blame onto low-ranking civil servants overseeing local areas; it said that cruel and overly zealous individuals twisted the development plans, creating deadly conditions within their jurisdictions.
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