China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’

We hear about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, of the mid 1960s. Lui Cixin’s sci-fi classic The Three Body Problem gives graphic insight into some of its effects.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel) But what of the earlier Great Leap Forward (1959-1961)? This was Mao Zedong’s attempt to compete with the USSR and it’s hyper-industrialisation, whose whole aim was to overtake USA in Gross National Product and export.So Mao took on the UK, aiming not just to match but overtake, in just three years. The power-rush of these isolated leaders. The English edition of Le Monde newspaper has an excellent article on the Great Leap Forward’s suppressed, forbidden three years of horrific famine. We read of grain harvests needed by farming populations, exported, in order to buy in farm machinery from USSR.https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/09/10/china-s-forbidden-memory-of-the-greatest-famine-in-history_6757395_4.html and the subsequent starvation without…