Famine in the Countryside
''In many parts of the country around the Chinese New Year of 1959, starvation set in and the weak and the elderly began to die. Stories of food shortages reached Mao's ears. He refused to believe them and jumped to the conclusion that the peasants were lying. [...] Over the three years from 1958 China doubled her grain exports and cut her imports of food. [...] People ate cats, dogs, insects. Parents fed dying children their own blood mixed with hot water. In the yellow-earth country of northwest China, people abandoned their children by the roadside in holes dug out of the soft soil."
~Jasper Becker, Author of Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
~Jasper Becker, Author of Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
"In those years, starvation became a sort of mental manacle, depriving us of our freedom to think"
~Han Weitian, survivor of the Great Leap Forward
During these three years of natural calamities, the harvest rate should have remained the same. This catastrophe was caused solely by Mao's error.
"If the decline in grain output did not contribute significantly to excess mortality, as in Sen’s analysis of several well-known historical famines, the causes of the production crisis, such as bad weather, would be irrelevant factors in explaining the famine. Although inferior climate could severely damage agricultural production, researchers are cautious about the magnitude of its negative impact. Bad weather of similar magnitudes did occur in the past, but they did not result in such serious reduction in aggregate grain output as observed in 1959-61."
~ Journal of Political Economy (University of Chicago)