Why was china hit with a famine again?
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Forced collectivisation of an entirely agrarian economy.
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Industrial policy that encouraged small scale iron smelting in homemade furnaces causing huge environmental damage.
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Agricultural policy that ordered the extermination of sparrows who then couldn't keep insect populations down causing catastrophic damage to crops.
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Brutally cracked down on any dissenting voices, including scientists who happened to point out the potential flaws in Maos plan
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Contrary to OPs post, covering up the mistakes afterward and blaming outside influences and counter-revolutionaries rather than the failure of central policy.
According to a Wikipedia article, "After the launch of Reform and opening up, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially stated in June 1981 that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Right Deviation Struggle, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split."
The official statement is here, but I don't read Chinese.
Ah. Google Translate comes through. I think the relevant part is where they say (machine translated): "Mainly due to the mistakes of the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Anti-Rightist Movement", coupled with natural disasters at the time and the Soviet government's treacherous breach of the contract, my country's national economy encountered serious difficulties from 1959 to 1961, and the country and the people suffered heavy losses."
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I mean, Churchill was a massive racist. The famine in India killed approx. 2.1 million people.
But Zedong's policies led to a famine that killed approx. 36 million peoole, literally 10-15 times worse. It's nice that he grew his own veggies I guess but fuck me that's an insane failure of policy. If you managed to fuck up so bad you end up killing 36 million, I think it's fair to say you deserved the title of monster.
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Grok, is this true?