In 1958 the Chinese Communist Party launched the Great Leap Forward, merging collectives into people's communes, abolishing private plots and household cooking, and diverting labour to backyard steel furnaces and water-conservancy works. Local cadres reported grossly inflated harvests, and the state set procurement quotas against those reports, so that in the worst provinces - Anhui, Henan, Sichuan, Gansu, Guizhou - grain was requisitioned from villages that had none, while the newly tightened household registration system and militia roadblocks prevented peasants from leaving. The resulting famine of 1959-61 is the deadliest in recorded history; estimates of excess deaths range from about 15 million to 55 million. The Chinese demographers Ansley Coale and Judith Banister produced early estimates of 16.5 and 30 million; Cao Shuji's provincial reconstruction gives about 32.5 million; the journalist Yang Jisheng, working from provincial archives, gives about 36 million; Frank Dikotter argues for at least 45 million and emphasises deaths from violence as well as starvation; a minority of Chinese scholars, notably Sun Jingxian, argue that census-based methods overstate the toll by an order of magnitude. Archival work also documents beatings, torture and killings of peasants by cadres enforcing procurement. The policy was reversed from 1961-62 and the party itself later described the period as one of grave error.
The Chinese Communist Party collectivised the rural population into communes, requisitioned grain against inflated output claims, and restricted movement as famine set in
Official statistics put China's total population at about 660 million in 1958, roughly 84 per cent of it rural; by the end of 1958 essentially the whole rural population, some 550 million people, had been organised into people's communes with grain requisitioning and movement restrictions applied to them. Excess mortality estimates for 1959-61 range from about 15 million in official Chinese accounts to 30-45 million in Western and dissident scholarship.
The low end reflects the most conservative mainstream demographic reconstructions from Chinese census data (Coale and related work); the high end is Frank Dikotter's archive-based estimate, which counts deaths from violence and overwork as well as starvation. Yang Jisheng's roughly 36 million and Cao Shuji's 32.5 million sit between them. Disagreement turns on the reliability of the 1953, 1964 and 1982 censuses and on the treatment of unregistered deaths.
Provincial archival research by Yang Jisheng and Frank Dikotter documents grain requisitioning to the point of starvation, coerced labour on communal projects, beatings and torture by cadres, and the demolition of peasant houses for materials.
China