Mao's Famine

Áccording to Mao Tse-tung's physician, Mao was unaware of the extent of the famine, and by the time he came to know about it it was already too late Mao's physician believed that he may have been unaware of the extent of the famine, about the fake reports regarding food production by his staff and also did not want to criticise his policies and decisions. However upon learning of the extent of the starvation, Mao vowed to stop eating meat, an action followed by his staff. However, Professor Dikotter challenged the notion that Mao did not know about the famine until it was too late. He says that the idea that the state mistakenly took too much grain from the countryside because it assumed that the harvest was much larger than it was is largely a myth. According to him, the party knew very well that it was starving its own people to death. Mao specifically ordered the party to procure up to one third of all the grain, much more than had ever been the case, at a secret meeting in the Jinjiang Hotel in Shanghai dated March 25, 1959. At the meeting he also announced that "To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward. When there is not enough to eat, people starve to …show more content…
By the early 1970s agricultural and industrial productivity increased to a great extent and without any further famine, China was able to feed its massive population which was not possible during the KMT regime. Besides, the establishment of communes was a significant innovation. They seemed to be ideal solution to run the vast country effectively avoiding the problems of over-centralization. Moreover, it was also decided that China would remain predominantly an agrarian country with small-scale labour-intensive industry scattered around the countryside. China had a huge population, so this system eventually facilitated China to avoid the growing unemployment problems of the highly industrialized western