The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962)
- Mao’s new economic plan after five year plans criticized
- China organized into 28,000 communes
- Main factors:
- Great industrial and scientific activity
- Muscle power used to build, dams, and irrigation
- Small communal factories
- Famine a huge problem (30,000,000 deaths)
"It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," - Frank Dikotter