Today’s Leaping Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In 1958, millions of people in China began to starve. Their revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong was instituting the Great Leap Forward, a grand scheme to remake Chinese society by, among other things, uprooting traditional habits and lifestyles, moving millions of people from farm to city to work in factories, outlawing private garden plots, and creating enormous agricultural communes – reforming agriculture to conform to Maoist politics. His timing was inauspicious. The Great Leap Forward was launched just when drought, floods, and enormous population growth combined to tighten belts around China. When, on top of it all, Mao started enforcing his new policies, the agricultural system in some areas collapsed. Starvation began to spread. Hungry peasants began eating their livestock. When the animals were gone, they turned to wild vegetables, made grass soup, and in some places stripped the bark from trees and ate it. Cannibalism was reported. Despite everything, by 1961 an estimated thirty million Chinese had died from malnutrition. Instead of a great leap forward, Mao had triggered China’s great famine, the worst mass starvation in recorded history.