Mao Zedong’s campaign of 1958–1962 to vault China into communism almost overnight, through giant rural communes and mass-mobilized labor. It collapsed into the deadliest famine in recorded history — an estimated 15 to 45 million dead — a catastrophe the Chinese state concealed at the time and still suppresses.
Across China, peasants melted down their own pots, knives, and farm tools in clay furnaces in their yards, trying to make steel. They produced brittle, useless iron. This was the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's drive to overtake Britain and reach communism in a few short years by sheer force of will. Hundreds of millions were herded into vast communes, pulled off the harvest, and set to grand schemes that ideology promised would work and that did not. As crops rotted in the fields, terrified local officials reported imaginary record harvests, and the state seized grain against those fictions, taking even the food and seed the peasants needed to live. The result was probably the deadliest famine ever recorded. Estimates of the dead range from roughly 15 million to 45 million or more. The Chinese government hid the catastrophe then, and it remains a suppressed subject there now.