The Great Chinese Famine, 1959–61: Mao's Great Leap Disaster

By D. R. Ashworth · November 24, 2024 · Updated October 17, 2026 · 6 min read

• People's Republic of China
• Famines
• Planned Economies

The Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961 was the largest famine in human history. It was caused by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward: a campaign that forced China’s peasants into vast communes, demanded impossible harvests, and kept taking grain from the countryside — and exporting it — while villagers starved. Demographers estimate about 30 million premature deaths; the journalist-historian Yang Jisheng counts 36 million, and Frank Dikötter puts the toll as high as 45 million (Ashton et al.; Johnson). The Chinese Communist Party still calls the period the “three years of natural disaster.”

The Great Leap Forward

In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward. Its rural centerpiece was the people’s commune: peasants were organized into huge collective units, and food itself was placed under the control of communal kitchens. The staff who “held the ladles” decided who ate, and the posts went to the Party’s most trusted members (Johnson).

Even the Party’s own verdict, adopted in 1981, concedes that the Great Leap Forward and the commune movement “were initiated without careful investigation and study” (CCP Central Committee, 1981).

Inflated harvests and relentless procurement

The state set its grain demands on the belief that collectivization had produced an agricultural breakthrough. As the historian Thomas Bernstein shows, that belief was mistaken, and the extraction built on it — and Mao and his associates bore responsibility for it (Bernstein).

Village leaders sent their harvests to state granaries to meet targets they could never honestly meet, leaving their own people with nothing. Once the grain was gone, the granaries were rarely opened to feed the hungry, and officials who dared to open them were punished, often with death (Johnson). An economic study of county-level data finds that the procurement system grew increasingly “progressive and inflexible” just as output collapsed (Kasahara and Li). Grain output fell by more than a quarter in 1960–61 (Ashton et al.).

Lushan, 1959: the moment to stop

In the summer of 1959, at a Party conference at Lushan, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai criticized the excesses of the Great Leap. Mao purged Peng and his supporters as “right opportunists” and launched a Party-wide campaign against anyone who doubted the Leap (CCP Central Committee, 1981). With critics silenced, the policies continued. As Ian Johnson summarizes Yang Jisheng’s account, Lushan “turned what had been a contained disaster into one of history’s greatest catastrophes” (Johnson).

The 1981 resolution itself admits that Mao “erred in initiating criticism of Comrade Peng Dehuai,” and that the economic disaster of 1959–61 was “mainly due to the errors of the Great Leap Forward and of the struggle against ‘Right opportunism’” — before adding “a succession of natural calamities” and the Soviet government’s scrapping of its contracts as further causes (CCP Central Committee, 1981).

Exporting grain during the famine

China kept exporting grain while its people starved. Using county-level data, the economists Hiroyuki Kasahara and Bingjing Li find that higher grain exports substantially increased death rates, especially in counties far from railways and with few Party members. By their estimate, grain exports alone explain 15 percent of the famine’s excess deaths (Kasahara and Li).

Xinyang and the face of the famine

The worst-hit places became infamous. In Xinyang, in central Henan province, one person in eight died. Officials there held some 12,000 “struggle sessions” against villagers accused of hiding food, and the postal service was so heavily monitored that it essentially shut down. When the scale of the deaths reached Beijing, Mao blamed landlords who had supposedly retaken control of the area (Johnson).

The surviving records document starvation so extreme that people resorted to cannibalism, including within families — cases preserved in Party investigation reports that historians have since recovered (Johnson).

How many died

There was no honest count. Historians reconstruct the losses from censuses and population registers, and the results vary with method and with the years included.

The chart at the top of this page shows the shape of the catastrophe in the UN’s reconstruction of China’s death rate: from about 18 deaths per 1,000 people in 1958 to 24.4 in 1959 and 29.8 in 1960, before falling back after the famine ended (UN World Population Prospects 2024).

A famine that lasted a lifetime

The damage did not end in 1961. Studies of survivors find that childhood exposure to the famine reduced adult height, weight, labor supply and education — and the younger the child when the famine struck, the greater the harm (Meng and Qian).

Hiding the famine

The Party never allowed a full reckoning. Its 1981 resolution acknowledged only that the period “caused serious losses to our country and people,” and official usage still refers euphemistically to “three years of natural disaster.” Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone remains banned in mainland China and was published in Hong Kong. Its central finding, in Johnson’s words, is that the Party, “from the village chief up to Chairman Mao, knew exactly what was going on” (Johnson).

Mistake, or crime?

Historians agree that the famine was man-made; they differ on how to characterize the leadership’s responsibility.

Thomas Bernstein, comparing China with the Soviet famine of 1932–33, finds no evidence that the Great Leap’s grain procurement was conceived as a weapon of war or punishment against the peasantry, as Stalin’s had been. In his account the famine was the product of a leadership that believed its own fantasies about agricultural abundance — though Mao and his associates remain responsible for it (Bernstein). In later work Bernstein went further: Mao had seen the human cost of the Leap’s excesses in 1958 and condemned them, yet after Lushan he revived the same radical policies under a harsh new anti-rightist campaign. In doing so, Bernstein concludes, Mao “wilfully ignored the lessons of the first radical phase for the sake of achieving extreme ideological and developmental goals” (Bernstein, 2006).

Yang Jisheng and Frank Dikötter put more weight on knowledge. The Party learned early what was happening in the villages, Yang shows, and its leaders chose to keep collecting grain, keep exporting it, punish officials who fed the hungry, and purge the one senior leader who spoke out (Johnson).

A disputed quotation

The most widely quoted line about the famine comes from Dikötter. He reports that at a secret meeting at the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai on 25 March 1959 — where Mao was ordering the Party to procure up to a third of all grain, far more than ever before — Mao said: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill” (Dikötter).

Readers should know that this reading is contested. The historian Anthony Garnaut argues that Dikötter misreads the meeting record: in context, he contends, the “half” to be sacrificed referred metaphorically to the excess of industrial construction projects Mao wanted cut, not to people in the countryside. Thomas Bernstein treats the remark as an example of Mao’s habitual hyperbole. Dikötter has replied that a remark about letting half the people die, made while the countryside was starving, cannot be dismissed as a figure of speech (Garnaut, 2013; Dikötter, 2013).

We include the quotation because it is so often cited, and because readers deserve to know both what it says and why historians disagree about it. But our conclusions do not rest on it. The case against the leadership rests on what it did.

Our view. The Great Chinese Famine was not aimed at a national group in the way that the Holodomor was aimed at Ukraine, and we do not call it genocide. But it was not a natural disaster or an honest mistake either. By the summer of 1959 the leadership had been told the truth and chose to silence the man who told it. Everything that followed — the continued procurement, the exports, the punishment of officials who opened the granaries, the decades of concealment — was a choice made by a one-party state that answered to no one. Tens of millions of people died because that state put its prestige and its plans above their lives.

Further reading on this site

• The Hundred Flowers Campaign — how the Party invited criticism in 1957, then punished it.
• Mao Zedong Thought and its evolution — the ideology behind the Great Leap.
• The Holodomor — the Soviet famine in Ukraine, 1932–33.
• All articles on China and on famines.