Hungry Ghosts, banquet toasts and greasy takeout in Ye fake People's Republic.
But terrible as the Cultural Revolution was, it did not approach the horrific proportions of the Great Leap Forward.
A wide variety of sources confirms a death toll of 30 million or more. The earliest estimates along these lines emerged only after China made its official data available to the West. As Becker explains, “In the mid-1980’s, American demographers were able to examine population statistics which had been released when China launched her open-door policy in 1979. Their conclusion was startling: at least 30 million people had starved to death, far more than anyone, including the most militant critics of the Chinese Communist Party, had ever imagined” (p. xi). Becker’s investigations turn up a broad range of estimates, most of them in the range from 30 million to as many as 60 million unnatural deaths during 1958 through 1961.
How did this gigantic loss of life all come to pass? In standard Leninist fashion,
Mao began his rule with a brief but strategically vital “new economic policy” period. He gave the bulk of the Chinese peasantry a few years to enjoy the end of the civil war. But while average Chinese were rebuilding their lives, Mao was busily destroying the latent threat that all ;;;nonaverage;;; Chinese presented to his authority.
With the Suppress Counterrevolutionaries Movement, Mao turned his guns on (and filled his slave labor camps with) Nationalists, landlords, and religious leaders. Similarly, the Land Reform Movement scapegoated better-off peasants, seizing their lands, sending them to labor camps, and executing them.
Once these natural leaders of village resistance to the central government were out of the picture, Mao was ready for phase two: forced collectivization.
Stalin’s methods provided the model, but internal Party opposition slowed down the pace for the first few years. By 1956 the job was largely complete: 400 million peasants were pressured into pooling animals, tools, and seed, and accepting the direction of Party authorities. Internal passports were introduced, travel severely restricted, and strict grain quotas set. The results were typical:grain yields fell 40 percent in 1956, livestock was slaughtered to avoid expropriation, and local famines began to appear.
https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_04_3_caplan.pdf