The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Year ...

million,⁵ although a larger number of 40 to 45 million has been widely presented.⁶ Death tolls of the Cultural Revolution range from 1.5 million deaths in rural China due to collective killings to a total of 15 million if we include both the perished and prosecuted.⁷ Throughout Mao’s rule, disruptive political movements dominated every aspect of ordinary citizens’ lives, resulting in countless wrongfully accused political victims and prisoners who were sent to labor camps or executed without due process. Mao’s final crusade, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which he believed to be one of his greatest achievements,⁸ was a centrally administered anarchy that fomented gross injustice and chaos in every sector of the society for a long decade—the depth and scale of which are unmatched by any political campaign in modern world history.

Preceding the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, during wich there was a terrible nationwide famine, a direct result of Mao’s fanatical, impatient approach to nationwide industrialization and agricultural growth and later his stubborn refusal to change his erroneous policies. China’s Great Famine, considered the largest in world history, has been categorized as “three years of natural disasters” by the Communist Party’s official rhetoric when it was completely man-made. It was caused not by natural disasters or threats of war but by Mao Zedong and his government. Suppressing information about the famine, the Communist Party declared that the massive starvation was the result of natural disasters. This official rhetoric has remained widely accepted as fact by those who survived and by later generations. With such a successful cover-up, who can bear witness to the truth? While the Cultural Revolution has been frequently represented in various media and artistic venues, the devastation of the Great Famine has yet to be fully captured. Ralph A. Thaxton, agreeing with Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, writes that official Chinese historiography on the Great Leap Forward barely mentions the catastrophic damage it caused to individuals, families, and communities.⁹