Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap
Food Chain Radio Host Michael Olson
Urban Farming Agriculturalist
MAO TSE TUNG’S GREAT LEAP
Why did Mao starve 45 million to death?
Guest: University of Hong Kong Professor Frank Dikotter – Author, Mao’s Great Famine
When all else had been eaten, there were only two things left to eat, and one of them was the good earth.
Between 1958 and 1962, China entered into a race to superpass the Soviet Union and become the world’s preeminent socialist nation.
Food Chain Radio host Michael Olson: MAO TSE TUNG’S GREAT LEAP Why did Mao starve 45 million to death?
To affect his Great Leap Forward, Mao mobilized China’s greatest asset– peasant farmers– by taking them off their farms and placing them into collectives. Once firmly locked into collectives, farmers were assigned a communal production brigade with a specific responsibility, like making steel or building a dam.
Word came down through the government as to how much production was demanded of each collective brigade, and government quotas kept growing in size and scope.
Soon a conflict developed between the collective’s ability to grow food and its ability to make steel or build dams. Something had to give way, and it was the food.
As a consequence of Mao’s great leap, 45 to 65 million Chinese were worked, beaten, and starved to death. And so we ask…
How did Chairman Mao take total control of China’s farmers?
How did Mao’s government withhold food from the people who grew the food?
