The DEADLIEST Famine

In September 1958, a county in southern China announced it had grown 65 tonnes of rice on one field the size of two and a half tennis courts. Three years later, about 30 million people in China had starved to death, in the deadliest famine ever recorded. How a boast to overtake Britain in fifteen years became the Great Leap Forward: the communes and the free canteens, backyard furnaces melting down woks, a war on sparrows, record harvests that only existed on paper, and a state that took grain by the paper numbers and sold it abroad. Then one honest letter at Lushan, the purge that followed, the hungry years of 1959 to 1961, the visitors who saw nothing, the meeting of seven thousand officials, and the eighteen farmers of Xiaogang who signed with red thumbprints. Estimates of the dead run from about 15 to 55 million; most say about 30 million. Chapters 00:00 How much rice fits on one field? 00:53 Overtake Britain in fifteen years 02:35 How China worked: the Tower 03:33 The communes and the free canteens 05:00 Backyard steel 06:07 The war on sparrows 07:24 Record harvests 09:12 The Tower runs backwards 11:09 Lushan: one honest letter 13:32 The Great Hall 14:01 1960 15:15 Ideas from the top 16:10 Xinyang 16:40 The visitors who saw nothing 17:37 Liu Shaoqi goes home 18:24 Seven thousand officials 19:42 Yellow cat, black cat 20:13 The toll 20:48 Xiaogang 22:31 Who won the race? Sources - Yang Jisheng, "Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962" (2012) - Frank Dikötter, "Mao's Great Famine" (2010) - Wei Li and Dennis Tao Yang, "The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster", Journal of Political Economy 113:4 (2005) - Basil Ashton, Kenneth Hill, Alan Piazza and Robin Zeitz, "Famine in China, 1958-61", Population and Development Review 10:4 (1984) - Cao Shuji, "The Great Famine: China's Population in 1959-1961" (Hong Kong, 2005) - Thomas P. Bernstein, "Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959-1960", The China Quarterly 186 (2006) - Mao Zedong, Speech at the Lushan Conference (23 July 1959) and Talk at an Enlarged Working Conference (30 January 1962): https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/ - Chen Hairu, on the 1960 food-substitute campaign: https://www.aisixiang.com/data/15649.html - Kasahara and Li, "Grain Exports and the Causes of China's Great Famine" (NBER conference paper): https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f100904.pdf Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): "Jaunty Gumption", "Guzheng City", "Master of the Feast", "Investigations", "Amazing Plan", "The Builder", "Pixel Peeker Polka - faster", "Merry Go", "Fluffing a Duck", "Hidden Agenda", "Unanswered Questions", "Eastern Thought", "Dark Walk", "Lamentation", "Local Forecast - Elevator", "Deliberate Thought", "Covert Affair", "Scheming Weasel (faster version)", "Teller of the Tales", "Comic Plodding", "Heartbreaking", "Hidden Past", "Long Road Ahead", "Carefree". Sound effects: Kenney (kenney.nl) and Freesound contributors (CC0). Maps: Natural Earth (public domain).