The Three Years Of Great Chinese Famine Case Study

Introduction - The ‘Three Terrible Years’
The period between 1958 and 1961 is known as the Three Years of Great Chinese Famine. It is also referred to as ‘The Three Years of Natural Disasters’ or ‘The Difficult Three Year Period’ because China doesn’t want to admit the true cause of the disaster. (Branigan, 2013)
Natural factors do play a major role in this disaster, but one questions whether the famine would have been this severe if it had taken place in a democracy. The economist Amartya Sen said for example: ‘no famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy, be it economically rich or relatively poor’. (Bernstein, 1999)
Up till now, the famine is not very known among people across the world, partly because
The communes couldn’t cope with the tasks they were assigned to do. What was even worse was that when commune leaders would complain about it, they would be charged with being a ‘bourgeois reactionary’, which would lead to prison. (The Great Leap Forward, 2014) These leaders would thus cover up shortfalls in production to protect their own lives and positions. In one example, Mao Zedong was doing a tour in one of the agricultural communes to judge the conditions himself, but the party leaders had ordered peasants to transplant thousands of grain stalks by hand from other farms into a ‘model field’; in that way Mao would believe that everything was fine. This kind of practices unfortunately happened all the time. ‘One famous propaganda picture showed Chinese children standing atop a field of wheat, so densely grown that it could apparently support their weight, but they were standing on a bench concealed beneath the plants.’ (Great Chinese Famine,
In China, much of the food production is dependent on the weather, and 1958 could have been a wonderful year regarding food production. Party leaders didn’t want other people to know about this failure so they lied about the total harvest. (The Great Leap Forward, 2014)
Unfortunately, the year after this was a very bad year for growing food. Flooding in some areas and drought in others were part of the reason for the non-productive year. As was expected, starvation started to occur in parts of China, and the conditions of the next year, 1960, were even worse. At this point, it was believed that nine million people already had starved to death.
People were now given the most minimal amount of food, and in three years this had led to 20 million deaths. (The Great Leap Forward, 2014)

Eventually, even Mao had to admit that the Great Leap Forward hadn’t been a success. He said: ‘The chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility.’ (Brugger, 1981)
Even though Mao was a popular man among the people, he still had to resign as Head of State. Also, communes were redesigned into manageable sizes and people received back their private land ownership. They were now able to produce as much food as they could. (Great Leap Forward,