The 1959-1961 famine in China, impelled by its collectivization plan--the Great Leap Forward, was an unthinkable and indisputable man-made horror in 20th century. When I face the number of death as large as 30,000,000, when I think of the countryside littered with the bodies of peasants who had starved to death, I couldn't help asking myself why this world's last big famine happened, why it lasted three years, and who should be responsible of it. This paper first examines the cause of the famine and the second section discusses why the famine did not stop immediately. Explicit consideration is given in the aspect of China's political, economic, and agricultural policies and Mao's personal ideology, imposed on both countryside and internal Party in the atmosphere of the cult and fright of Mao. .
The cause of the famine.
To examine the cause of the famine, it is inevitable to refer to Soviet Union, Mao's ignorance of modern science, and blind cult of Mao in China.
In the first decade of the new China, Soviet Union, the biggest Communism country in the middle period of last century, called "old brother" by Chinese, was considered as the only country China could most trust in and rely on. Soviet Union's social ideology and its economic, political, and agricultural policies to large extent convinced CCP, especially Mao that creating huge increases in grain and steel production would modernize China. .
"In Yanan, Mao and his colleagues carefully studied Moscow's propaganda works eulogizing the great achievements of such Soviet scientists as Lysenko." According to Lysenko's law of the life of species-- "individuals of the same species do not compete but help each other survive", which meshed perfectly with Mao's obsession with class struggle, eight-point blueprint for all Chinese agriculture was drawn up in 1958. Two of them, close planting and deep ploughing could not be validated by science.
