Mao's Great Famine

Summary

A history of the catastrophic famine caused by Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962, which Dikötter estimates killed at least 45 million people — making it one of the deadliest man-made disasters in recorded history. The book was the first to draw systematically on provincial and county archives that became partially accessible to researchers in the early 2000s, producing evidence of deliberate grain seizures, mass violence, and leadership awareness of the death toll. It fundamentally revised the historical record on the scale and intentionality of the catastrophe and sparked significant debate among scholars of modern China.