Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward was a campaign led by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party to transform China rapidly from an agricultural economy into an industrial one. Farmers were organised into large people's communes, and the leadership pressed for huge increases in grain and steel output, including the building of small backyard furnaces. Local officials exaggerated their harvest figures to meet the targets, and the state took grain based on those inflated numbers, while farm work was neglected. The result was one of the worst famines in history, in which tens of millions of people died, although estimates of the toll vary widely. The campaign was abandoned in the early 1960s and weakened Mao's position for a time.

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