The origins of the Great Leap Forward famine of China can be traced to both political and natural forces, but the rule of Mao Zedong and his Chinese communist leadership is by far chiefly responsible for the country’s horrific human catastrophe of 1958 through 1961. The Great Leap Forward movement was the second of three five-year campaigns created by Mao and his party, to demonstrate the formerly agrarian country’s ability to surpass other nations in a rapid revolution towards the perfect communist state.  The collective goal was to abolish all private property, and simultaneously convert the largely rural country into a Stalinist bureaucracy of advanced industrialization and agriculture monopolized by the party. Mao intended to show the world he could successfully convert the population into a massive communal workforce, and thereby establish China as a world economic power in a fraction of the time taken by other countries, under other governments.

Peasants living in all areas of the nation outside the cities were forced to give up all means to grow food for self-sustainment, and were instead directed into primitive backyard steel-smelting operations, or communal work farms. Since Mao had no detailed understanding of steel manufacturing, the quality of metal produced in these unrefined operations bore no useable steel, and he was forced to quietly abandon this goal to concentrate solely on agriculture. For a three-year period beginning in 1959, the peasant population was restricted to work only for the farm labor communes. Those unwilling to participate in the regime’s new collective ideology were simply starved to death. To make matters worse, China also adapted the new and controversial agriculture practices of a Soviet biologist whose work was intended to produce crops on a much-accelerated schedule, but whose practices turned out to be highly inefficient, and in some cases, damaging to the fields farmed with his methods. A number of natural perils struck many parts of the country during this period as well, including drought, floods and a massive locust infestation, driving many over-taxed farm fields into a state of total non-production.

The famine resulting from Mao’s political delusion is estimated to have killed between twenty and forty million people, but due to the highly secretive records of this regime, the actual number may never be known. Citizens of China’s cities, whose urban status was relegated at birth, were issued ration tickets for all food and other goods throughout the famine period, and most did not feel its effects until the third year, if at all. Although many received lass than satisfactory food portions due to their sex or lower party status, most city dwellers had no idea that entire villages in the country’s rural areas were starving to death. Acts of cannibalism, including reports of parents killing and eating their own children, was reportedly witnessed across rural portions of the entire nation.

Three agonizing years passed before the communist party relaxed its agricultural policies and began importing grain to feed its own, without admitting that a famine had ever occurred. The first international news of the catastrophe began to surface in 1982, after China released its first credible public census numbers in several years, which numbered tens of millions less than the reports of earlier years. In addition, though many reports surfaced from those who managed to flee to Hong Kong during the famine years, no human rights challenge was ever directed at the party or its leaders by any other country. The earliest comprehensive journalistic accounting of the incident wasn’t even published until 1998.

To this day, there has never been a public comment of any kind offered on the famine or its victims by the leaders of the People’s Republic of China, and many historians suspect that once the last survivors die off, the government will never have to account for it. The famine’s continuing lack of attention by the governments of western nations and others remains a complete mystery as well. What this event, and the lack of outside intervention in it says about our own country’s stand on human rights is unclear at best, and unforgiveable at worst. It is difficult to imagine that any enforceable action is ensconced in this country’s human rights policy when we continue to stand by, mute and motionless, in the shadow of such massive human barbarity.