The Great Chinese Famine (大饥荒, Da Jihuang), officially termed the "Three Years of Difficulty" (三年困难时期), was the catastrophic famine that devastated the People's Republic of China between 1959 and 1961. It was the direct consequence of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), the economic and social campaign launched by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party at the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress (May 1958) to transform China from an agrarian economy into an industrialised socialist society through rapid collectivisation and mass mobilisation. Demographers and historians estimate excess mortality at between 15 and 45 million, with Frank Dikötter (Mao's Great Famine, 2010), drawing on provincial archives, placing the figure at a minimum of 45 million, and Yang Jisheng (Tombstone / 墓碑, 2008) estimating roughly 36 million—making it the deadliest famine in recorded human history.
The famine was overwhelmingly man-made rather than the product of natural disaster, though drought and flooding aggravated conditions. The forced amalgamation of peasants into People's Communes (人民公社) abolished private plots and household cooking, while the diversion of agricultural labour to backyard steel furnaces and irrigation projects collapsed grain output. Crucially, the "wind of exaggeration" (浮夸风)—cadres inflating harvest figures to please superiors—led the state to requisition grain on the basis of fictitious yields, stripping villages of seed and subsistence stocks. Lysenkoist pseudo-science championed by Trofim Lysenko, including close planting and deep ploughing, ruined crops. The state simultaneously continued exporting grain to repay Soviet debts and project an image of abundance. At the Lushan Conference (1959), Defence Minister Peng Dehuai's letter criticising the Leap was denounced, silencing dissent and prolonging the disaster as policy correction was delayed.
The famine's political reckoning reshaped the PRC. By 1960–61, pragmatists Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping engineered a partial retreat, restoring private plots and rural markets; Liu reportedly told Mao the disaster was "three parts natural, seven parts man-made." Mao was compelled to step back from frontline administration, a humiliation that historians link to his launching of the Cultural Revolution (1966) to reassert authority. The famine remains a sensitive subject in China in 2026, downplayed in official historiography as a period of "difficulties," with Yang Jisheng's Tombstone banned on the mainland and discussion suppressed.
For the civil services and China Modern History papers, the Great Chinese Famine is examined as the central case study of the Great Leap Forward's failure and of the dangers of authoritarian planning detached from feedback mechanisms. Typical question angles include: the causes and consequences of the Great Leap Forward; comparison with the Soviet famine of 1932–33 (Holodomor) under Stalinist collectivisation; Amartya Sen's thesis (Poverty and Famines, 1981; Development as Freedom, 1999) that famines do not occur in functioning democracies with a free press, contrasting China's 1959–61 catastrophe with India's avoidance of major famine after independence. Candidates should also link it to the intra-Party power struggle that prefigured the Cultural Revolution.
Example
In 1959, Defence Minister Peng Dehuai privately wrote to Mao Zedong criticising the Great Leap Forward's failures; at the Lushan Conference he was purged, and grain requisitioning continued as the famine peaked.
Frequently asked questions
It was primarily man-made, caused by the Great Leap Forward's forced collectivisation into People's Communes, diversion of labour to backyard steel furnaces, inflated harvest reporting that led to excessive grain requisitioning, and Lysenkoist farming methods. Drought aggravated but did not originate the catastrophe.