How Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' Killed 45 Million People | Mao's Great Famine

In 1958, nine years after coming to power, Mao wanted to bring China out of its almost medieval state of underdevelopment. He launched a program of industrialization in towns and in the country, intended to take China into the promised land of the socialist paradise in less than 15 years. It was the great leap forward. But the crazy dream became a nightmare, and dragged 650 million Chinese people into hell. The country sank into economic chaos, which caused an unprecedented famine. The terrible death toll was around 45 million. Even today, Mao is an untouchable icon. As the founding father of Red China, he holds the nation together and gives legitimacy to the current authorities. So as not to damage his image, the Chinese Communist Party has maintained a deafening silence on this tragedy for 50 years. For the first time, this film is raising the curtain on this bloody episode in Chinese history. Getting the few witnesses to talk about the period and trying to reconstruct the memory of the great famine is not without danger. Very few have dared to defy the taboo and break the silence. Zhu Sun, a young historian from the University of Hong Kong, felt she had to take on this task. Over four years, she crisscrossed the Chinese countryside to collect the testimony of survivors of this terrible tragedy. As soon as I think about that time, my legs start to shake and I feel a great sadness. I prefer not to think about it, because I feel pain when people talk about it. Among the people she talked to, many had never had a chance to tell their story, and some survivors are very elderly. So Zhu Sun's task was an urgent one. For her, it isn't only a duty of memory. It's also a personal story, since several members of her family died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Yang Zhisheng, a journalist and historian, published Tombstone in 2008. It was the first Chinese book on the Great Famine. Published in Hong Kong, it has been banned in mainland China. His own father died of starvation during that period. Even if no one from my family had died of starvation, I would still have written the book, because it's very important. As a journalist, I had to bear witness. I did it so that future generations can know the truth. To understand how the Great Leap Forward caused the death of tens of millions of people, we must go back to the origins of the communist regime, the taking of Beijing by the Red Army in January 1949. The central government of the people is established. For Mao, who wanted to make a clean break with the past, the task was huge. He had to overcome the traditions, the mindsets, the archaic ways of life of an old-fashioned society. He also had to stamp out the endemic famines and their processions of misery. The Chinese expected a lot from their new regime. They had heard the communists' promise to build a fairer society. To realise his plans, Mao went to Moscow to ask Stalin for economic help and to consolidate the strategic alliance with the USSR. The Chinese leader felt huge admiration for his Soviet counterpart, who nevertheless treated him with contempt and made him wait two days before seeing him. The two countries signed a treaty of friendship. The USSR would supply China with huge quantities of arms, factories, industrial and farming equipment, and all kinds of advisers. This treaty sealed China's dependence, as the aid didn't come free. Not only did China commit itself to remaining within Moscow's circle of influence and following its economic model faithfully, but it would also have to repay the huge debt it had contracted. As the first step towards the Soviet model, less than a year after coming to power, the Chinese communists started a massive reform of agriculture. It affected half of all cultivated land and benefited 300 million poor peasants. All over China, these land redistributions were the opportunity for the settling of scores. Encouraged by the party, the poor peasants, who had been used to suffering and humiliation for 2,000 years, raised their heads and gave free reign to their feelings of resentment. Class violence broke out. Over a million landowners were executed. The Chinese peasants had their best two years between 1950 and 1952, just after the land distribution and the agricultural reform. In 1950, they were still poor, but life quickly improved from 1952. In my home region, we were farming land which was ours, and we had enough to eat. We gave part of our harvest to the state, and we kept the rest for ourselves. That was plenty. I was young at the time, but I could feel that life was improving. The villages organized all sorts of artistic activities during the new year, but later all that was stopped. The liberator of China and the peasants was revered as a god of the harvests and worshipped as the emperor of the new red dynasty. But from 1953, these land redistributions made Mao fear the reappearance of a class of small landowners. So, on the model of the Soviet kolkhoz, the party persuaded the peasants to combine their plots into collectives of up to 50 families. This new step was greeted with mistrust, as it meant they had to return the land they had been given three years earlier to the community. In spite of everything, Mao still judged the Stalinist model as the ideal, even though the Soviet tyrant died in this same year, 1953. Then, an extraordinary event shook the socialist world. In February 1956, in his famous speech at the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Stalin, his personality cult, and his disastrous collectivization campaigns. As a result, in China, the Stalinist model praised by Mao was withdrawn. The campaign of agricultural collectivization was suspended, and Mao's ideas were no longer in favor. As always, when he had problems within the party, Mao turned to the people to regain the upper hand. As a good tactician, he invited the whole country to express themselves freely and to criticize the leadership. He called it the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and it took an unexpected turn. Delighted at this exercise in democracy, the intellectuals criticized the very nature of the communist regime. For Mao, whose aim was to flush out the critics, the strategy worked. He could then publicly identify all those who had spoken against the regime as class enemies. You're wrong. What are your political opinions? Do you realize what you're saying? Are you a teacher of the people or not? Do you take the point of view of a teacher of the people? Mao ordered violent repression. The slightest wrong word could be fatal. Between 500,000 and 1 million people, mostly teachers, were labeled as rightists and deported to forced labor camps where many died of starvation. 3,000 of these dissidents were sent to the Jiabiangou labor camp on the edge of the Gobi Desert, a so-called re-education camp. Oh, if only you knew. So many of us died. In all, 70% of the camp's population. At the time, we slept on the bare ground, in holes we were made to dig. The dead were put into big trucks and transported into the desert. They were covered with a thin layer of sand and, over time, their skeletons gradually came back to the surface. These are the remains of this mass grave just a few years ago. There is a climate of terror that reaches all the way to the top levels of leadership. Entire heads of provinces are being removed in 57, 58, and replaced by hard, unscrupulous men who are often willing to benefit from the very radical winds that blow from Beijing. The repression of the rightists removed all opposition and opened up the way for the great leap forward. The Communist Party was able to do what it wanted without any resistance, because no one dared speak out anymore. By silencing his enemies, Mao regained total control of the party. He returned to Moscow in November 1957, but his long-standing ally became his main rival. When Khrushchev declared that the Soviet Union's economic production would exceed that of the USA in 15 years, Mao took up the challenge. He said that China's steel production would exceed that of the United Kingdom in the same period. One hundred million peasants were recruited from all over the country to work almost with their bare hands on building projects on an epic scale, constructing roads, railways, dams and For Mao, there was no doubt. The great leap forward to a communist society had really begun. The slogan Dare to Think, Dare to Act became the official line of the party. Mao symbolically went out to work sites to lend the peasants his support. To underline the fact that he had rallied the whole party behind him, he was accompanied by Liu Shaoqi, the party's second-in-command, and Zhu Enlai. Liu confirmed his support for Mao by saying, hard work for a few years, happiness for a thousand. All means were used to mobilize the masses and to stimulate revolutionary zeal. In an extraordinary campaign, Mao identified a new enemy. Sparrows were accused of eating the crops. The Chinese were called out in their millions to prevent the birds landing. As a result, the sparrows died of exhaustion and gave way to a new enemy, insects. They profilerated and ate part of the harvest. This absurd campaign was followed by another step towards radical collectivization. During a journey, Mao saw a banner in a field praising the merits of the first experimental People's Commune set up in Henan province. He declared with enthusiasm, the People's Commune will be the bridge that will carry China towards the socialist paradise. The saying was taken up in all provinces, and in just one summer, thousands of communes were formed. They consisted of up to 2,000 families. There were even plans for enormous communes, combining up to 10 or 20,000 households, which would be headed by cadres who were totally dedicated to Mao. The working day started at dawn and finished after dark, accompanied by music to the glory of the great leap forward. As the basic unit of the future society, the commune experimented with a completely new way of life. Here, everything was designed to immerse the individual in a collective life geared towards production. All private property was abolished. Houses, animals, land and production tools became collective property. Nurseries and free compulsory schools liberated women from their maternal duties so they could work in the fields. At that time, I was very young. I was a member of the youth league and in charge of propaganda, so that shows that I believed in communism. I thought communism was fantastic. From when we were tiny, we were taught that the communist paradise would soon come, and we only had to endure a little suffering and make a few sacrifices to reach it. That was how I saw things. The family unit disappeared and children were made to live by the new rules of collective life. The individual was nothing more than a cog in a big machine. I think the words were, socialism is good, something like that, but I can't really remember. Did you sing different songs when you were at home? We only sang in school. Outside, life was very hard. There was never any let up. Why would we want to sing? As in a barracks, men and women were separated and grouped in dormitories. Sexual relationships were regulated. Men and women were separated and couldn't live a married life. Some couples went to the fields to continue their sex life. But when they were caught, they were publicly humiliated. Some women found it unbearable and many committed suicide. So you pulled everything and all lived together? The household items were pulled in the first year. The furniture was seized for firewood and everything that could be destroyed was destroyed. The pigs, the sheep, everything was collectivized. Even the pots and pans were seized because families weren't allowed to cook. No one cooked at home anymore. The aim was to force the peasants to take their meals in the commune's collective canteens. In some of them, they even abolished money. A system of work points was established. Food was distributed according to merit, i.e. each person's capacity to fulfill the production objectives. The notion of wages disappeared. It was compulsory to turn up every day. If your name wasn't on the attendance list, you were punished and you lost work points. They took points away from you? Yes. But without work points, you had nothing to eat. The fewer work points you earned, the less food they gave you. Oh, it was miserable. I can tell you that life was brutal for everyone at that time, except the cadres. Those people lived well. The party cadres became the officers of the people's communes, which were transformed into real barracks. Every day, the peasants underwent military training because the masses had to be mobilized for the national defense. Every morning, the peasants gathered at the entrance to the village and waited for the group leader to allocate the tasks. At the end of the day, the leader shouted, Work's over! And the peasants went to eat. They weren't motivated and productivity was very low. That was one reason why productivity didn't increase. In the people's communes, peasants had no right to free speech. Their skills weren't taken into consideration anymore. Everything was decided by the authorities, who mostly knew nothing about the subject. They decided everything. The distance between each rice seedling, the type of seed, the amount of fertilizer to be used, land suitable for one type of crop was used for another. As a result, the peasants became totally demotivated and poor harvests caused the first food shortages. But Mao always wanted more. To increase agricultural production, he made communes compete against each other. The ones that recorded the biggest harvests were rewarded in ceremonies organized by the party, while the inhabitants of the communes were terribly short of food. This was a world where achieving record production, called launching a satellite, went hand in hand with announcing falsified figures. The cadres were caught up in an escalating spiral. At the provincial meeting, my superiors asked me what I thought about it all. Some places have launched plenty of satellites and declared high levels of production. What do you think? My back was against the wall and I had to say that I would respect the quotas without fail. But in reality, I couldn't keep those commitments. It was impossible. They showed Soviet advisers a field of wheat where the ears were so extraordinarily close together that they supposedly supported the weight of six people. The photo was on the front page of the People's Daily. Everyone was fooled. And those who weren't were too scared to say it was a con. The Soviet Union was a great power. Lying became common at all levels of the hierarchy. The figures for agricultural and industrial production were falsified throughout the country to meet and even exceed the targets set by the Party. In the autumn of 1958, although there was some wheat, there was a shortage of food. The town of Dangshang in the region of Shangsu boasted about good harvests and we went to take a look. It was supposed to be a fertile area. Everyone who went quickly realised that it was all nonsense. They showed us piles of crops where the cereals were on the top but underneath was just straw and stubble. Everyone understood what they'd done but no one dared talk about it. I saw the trick too. As a consequence of these exaggerations, the tax paid in grain by the communes was calculated on a false basis. In some regions, the result was that the state demanded almost all the amounts really harvested. To make matters worse, the spring harvest in 1959 was disastrous. The wheat had hardly been cut when all the members of the commune were made to carry the crops on their back to a boat which took them away. They did it at night by torchlight. As soon as the crops were gathered, the wheat was taken away. Yes. They were shipping it out to pay debts. Yes. Do you know which country had to be paid back? How would I know? So who told you that the debts had to be paid? The cadres said that. At every harvest, Deng Xiaoping said debts had to be repaid even if the country was very poor. Did they leave you a little bit or not? A few kilograms. Far too little to feed us till the next year. The famous debt was the one that China had contracted with the USSR for the purchase of hundreds of factories that were delivered ready for use. Beijing undertook to repay Moscow in the form of agricultural produce. Mao wanted to accelerate repayment even if it meant people starving in the countryside. In some regions, people really had nothing to eat. I was sent out of the village on a mission but the members of my family who stayed behind were reduced to eating the bark of medlar trees. Tree bark? Yes, tree bark. They ate the roots of banana trees too, anything they could find. People also ate mud, a sort of white mud. Stems of rice too. We were so hungry that we filled our stomachs with whatever we could find. Once I saw an adult collapse. He fell to the ground while trying to eat a sort of bean paste. He died in front of me and he still had the food in his mouth. So I laid him under a tree. We were so hungry that soon afterwards we started eating the leaves of that tree. In other provinces, the shortage of food gave the cadres who distributed it the power of life or death over the inhabitants of the commune. In theory, peasants were entitled to 250 grams per day but the cadres allocated themselves much more. They were so corrupt that they stuffed themselves shamelessly. Those who didn't get on with the leader of the production team or those who disobeyed his orders were starved to death. He who does not work shall not eat. That is the principle that was applied from 1958 to 1962, meaning that entire categories of people deemed to be unfit, deemed to be too weak or vulnerable, pregnant women, were deliberately cut off from the canteens and starved to death. That qualifies as murder. Were the cadres here very violent? Yes, very cruel. I remember that when they caught some peasants who had stolen some roots from the fields, they tied them up from head to foot. In village number eight, one violent cadre beat several people to death. The collective canteens became a sort of weapon in the hands of the cadres who managed them. I know of many examples like the case of one man in charge of a collective canteen in a village in the province of Qinghai who one day summoned a very beautiful woman. She was suffering a lot from the famine and the cadre asked her how many days it was since she had eaten. Then he ordered her to undress. When he saw her naked, he said, Why are your breasts shriveled? The woman answered, My chest is now as flat as a man's. The cadre demanded that she bring him her daughter. Her daughter was very young, but she accepted. In exchange for two miserable loaves of bread, she killed herself soon afterwards. In the spring of 1959, Mao's frenzy took another form. The great helmsman demanded 100 million tons of steel in the next three years. Since the production of the steel factories was insufficient, the peasants also had to contribute to the effort. They made small blast furnaces out of whatever they had. To make the small blast furnaces, we used mud mixed with hair to make it stronger. Many female comrades had to cut their hair. My youngest daughter also had to cut her hair and she cried, poor child. But it was compulsory. Nearly all the trees in China were cut down for fuel. Forests were razed and people had to melt down pots and kitchen utensils. Even school bells, ironwork on doors, everything was melted down. And all the press rejoiced. The population was used in an absurd way. Anyone did anything. Society as a whole fell into a sort of indescribable madness. Officially, China started producing millions and millions of tons of steel. In reality, all that came out of these foundries was an unusable metal. These small blast furnaces worked day and night and mobilized tens of millions of peasants for nothing. Steel is one of these magic indicators of progress within the socialist world. The consequence, of course, is that the farmers are worked literally to death. And the grain is taken literally out of their mouths. But that's a price worth paying in Mao's view. It was the top leadership meeting in Shanghai, dining, drinking wine, buying cheap cameras, being entertained. The idea that Mao somehow didn't realize that there was mass famine in the countryside is a myth. It's a complete myth. A top secret document found in the archives reveals that not only was Mao completely aware of the peasants' distress, but it was part of his strategy to sacrifice the countryside in order to feed the cities and the industrial and political centers. It's a report on the debates in a Politburo session dated 25th of March, 1959. Mao stated, When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill. And at that very same conference in Shanghai, he actually orders procurements of grain to be increased to one third. An unheard of level. He says it very clearly. He says, if you take up to one third of the grain, the farmers will not rebel. He makes available thousands of trucks to go and carry out that task. In July 1959, Mao gathered the leaders of the party in Lushan, far away from Beijing. The original objective of this conference was to correct the increasingly apparent issues with the Great Leap Forward. The famous Marshal Peng Dehai was the only one who dared express himself in an open letter to Mao. The son of a peasant, he was upset by the destruction in people's lives caused by Mao's policy. He begged him, please think of the people. This was an insult to Mao. He forced him to resign from his post as Minister of Defence. This episode marked a tragic reality. No one else would dare to defy Mao as he persisted. The years that followed were terrible. When I went to the villages, oh, it was hard not to cry. In Mangdangshan, to the north of Yongcheng, as soon as we arrived, we saw the houses were empty, totally deserted. People were lying on mats with empty stomachs and their bodies swollen from lack of food. We could see they were dying of starvation, it was obvious. In that county, 120,000 people died out of a total population of one million. Around one inhabitant in ten died of starvation. Countless others were suffering from oedema. Can you imagine what it's like to starve to death, to spend your days with nothing to eat? You got very thin, and as you got thinner, at a certain point you had swelling. You'd be so swollen that it scared people. You had bruises all over your body. And in those cases, you shouldn't eat salt. But many people stole salt to eat in secret. Were you there when your grandparents died? Yes. What did they die of? They died of starvation, of constipation after eating mud to ease their hunger. We didn't even have a coffin to bury my grandfather in, so we buried him directly in the earth. Did no one bury the people who starved to death? Who could do it? They often died by the road, far from their families who weren't strong enough to bury them. I was walking along the river when I accidentally stepped on the belly of a dead body. I let go of the cart I was pulling to run away. A bit further on, I came across another body, a child that time. Gave me such a fright. The most shocking part of all this is that the population wasn't starving to death because of a complete lack of food. The state's granaries were full. In the time of the dynasties, when there were famines, the emperors opened the reserves and distributed the food to the people in distress. Conversely, the leadership of the Communist Party, a regime that claims to serve the people, refused to help the people who were starving and didn't open up the granaries that were full. That really astounded me. Whole populations were camped around the granaries. They begged, Communist Party, give us a little food. They begged until the starvation finished them off. It was unimaginable. The regions where the famine raged were cordoned off. It was forbidden for people or information to circulate, but many sought to escape. The few people who could move about saw that the destitution was widespread. When the train stopped in the station, I saw crowds of starving people stretching their hands through the windows to ask for food. Everyone was suffering from hunger at that time. All those people were fleeing the famine. Children, old people, they all ran around the train to beg food from the passengers. From 1958 onwards, the cities are quite literally protected from the countryside. People are not allowed to just move about freely. A farmer who brings a cow to the market will need to travel with a permit from his local kava. People who try to flee the countryside are sent back. Mao's radical methods caught the attention of his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, who was informed by his advisors on the ground. During the grandiose ceremonies for the 10th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, he took Mao aside and begged him in vain not to repeat the excesses of Stalinist collectivization. Khrushchev would say later, Mao thought he was an envoy of God charged with the divine task of building socialism before the Soviet Union. Mao ignored Khrushchev's warnings. He gave the order not just to carry on, but to increase production figures, which he said were necessary to the successes of the Great Leap Forward. Nine months later, Khrushchev suspended cooperation agreements with China and repatriated 15,000 advisors. It was the beginning of the split between the two countries. Liu Shaoqi, elected president of the republic in April 1959, tried to restrain Mao, who was still chairman of the party. But another year would go by before Liu Shaoqi ordered investigations into the reality of the famine on the ground. I went to investigate in Yongcheng, which is the biggest county in the Shangsu region, because I wanted to know what was really going on. Yongcheng wasn't under my jurisdiction, it was under Shangsu's. When the local leader found out that I was investigating, he told me lies. He ordered all the people I saw to repeat the same about the death toll from starvation. He said that in total 90,000 people had died unnatural deaths. In reality, the total was 120,000 people. As we said at the time, you couldn't say they had died of starvation. He instructed each district to declare a certain number of deaths so that the total never exceeded 90,000. All that was to hide the truth from us. Three high-ranking officials started investigations. They came to a result of several tens of millions dead from starvation. They wrote a report for Mao and Qiu Enlai, but Qiu Enlai immediately told them to destroy it and not to talk about it. A few days later, Qiu even called them to make sure the report had been burned. At the University of Hong Kong, Xu Jun is working with Frank Dakota, who has accessed certain testimonies from those investigations. These documents show terrible realities, which confirm the report of these three high-ranking officials. There's a very detailed report by a high-ranking military who goes back to his home village in Hunan and he sees that the graves in the fields have been tampered with. They've been opened. There are no bodies inside. So he wonders what is going on. It's a rainy day. He sees the house of the local party secretary, the smoke coming out. He walks up to the house, opens the door. He sees four large pots in which body parts are being boiled down. And it turns out that the local party secretary has decided that you can actually recycle human bodies, simmer them, and then use it as fertilizer on the fields. During the Great Famine, thousands of cases of cannibalism were recorded in official reports. There are plenty in the archives. I know of one case in Gansu where people ate their own dead relatives. The mother before she died said to her daughter, there's nothing left of my body to eat, just my heart. When I die, you can eat my heart. And that's what happened. When she died, her daughter ate her heart. But she in turn was eaten a few days later. In one case in Hunan province, very well documented by a top working team sent into the countryside, they found out that a man was forced to bury his own child alive because this child had also stolen some food. The father who was forced to bury that child died of grief three weeks later. In the spring of 1961, President Liu Shaoqi went to investigate for over a month in his home province of Hunan. He found out that friends and members of his family had died of starvation without him knowing about it because the local cadres had hidden the truth from him. He was upset. For Liu, the great leap forward had to be stopped. But it was only in 1962 that the party brought together 7,000 cadres from all across the country to put an end to the crazy undertaking of the great leap forward. Liu Shaoqi said that the party was largely responsible for the famine. He contradicted Mao on that issue because from the start, Mao had estimated the harmful aspects of the party's policy to be only 10% of the reason for the famine. Although the famine continued to claim victims until the end of 1962, the situation slowly improved with the re-establishment of farming on privately owned plots of land and free markets. Radical collectivization in the countryside and senseless quotas for farming production as well as steel production in small blast furnaces were all stopped. The great leap forward was over. But I have called the foreign minister, Mr. Kavish has, and has got permission to photograph freely in Peking. And I think that if this information were communicated to the people whose permission you are asking... The world knew nothing about these four years of tragedy. The regime at the time put everything in place to hide the truth at all costs. There were Western journalists working at the New China Agency. They translated our articles into English. In the 1960s, these foreigners regularly took their holidays in the province of Anhui. Everything was arranged for their arrival. The shops around where they were staying were filled up with food. Stylishly dressed girls were conscripted to canoe on the lake close by. The staging was magnificent and the foreigners wrote articles when they returned, swearing that there was no famine in China. Everything was staged to make the Western journalists believe that China was a paradise of virtue and plenty. In the same way, foreign political leaders were taken in. Returning from China in 1961, Francois Mitterrand described Mao as a humanitarian and certainly not a dictator. He said Mao had assured him, the Chinese people are not on the verge of famine. I repeat, in order to be clearly understood, there is no famine in China. It was an enormous lie. The Chinese leadership knew perfectly well that their policy was killing tens of millions of people. The question of who should answer for these acts before history was an issue of power more than ever before. Liu Shaoqi was called to see Mao Zedong by a swimming pool. And Liu Shaoqi made a mistake when he said, you and I are responsible for the famine. And all of it, including cannibalism, will go into the history books. History will judge us. At that point in time, I think Mao already sealed the fate of Liu Shaoqi and thought, this man is my worst enemy. Mao didn't want to be placed in difficulty by this subject or by others. So to regain power once more, he led the Chinese youth into the movement of the Cultural Revolution against the party bureaucrats. He took advantage of the radicalization of the situation to have Liu Shaoqi criticized and then arrested by young Red Guards. Imprisoned and without medical care, Liu died in a cell in 1969. From then on, no one would dare speak of the Great Famine again Who is responsible for what happened? There can only be a very simple answer to that or a very complicated one. The very simple answer is that Mao, Chairman Mao was responsible. He initiated it. He started it. It was his vision. He stopped it. He was responsible from beginning to end. Mao ranks as one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century. The more complicated version is how did one man get away with all of this? So it seems to me that it is both a man and a system who are both responsible for this. It's a collective responsibility of the Communist Party of China at that time. Why, 50 years after the Great Famine, do the authorities still refuse to recognize the reality of it, to discuss it? And to draw lessons from it? I think their attitude is stupid. The authorities are convinced that it would damage the legitimacy of the Communist regime and threaten its leadership. In my opinion, their fears are unfounded. Do you know why I wrote my book Tombstone? I'm a member of the Communist Party myself. I wrote this book primarily to lighten the shoulders of the Communist Party which continues to bear the huge burden of this history. Certainly one day it will have to rid itself of this weight. And the sooner the better. I'm convinced that a nation that can't really face up to its history has no future. When Mao died in September 1976, he left behind a country in ruins. The nation paid tribute to the great helmsman in a grand funeral. But in the gathered crowd, many must have been thinking about their loved ones who died in the Great Famine. Today, the figure for the death toll still divides historians. Yang Zhisheng estimates that the four years of the Great Famine killed at least 36 million people. Frank Dakota estimates the death toll to be at least 45 million. Other Chinese historians put forward the figure of 55 million, almost the same as the total number of victims in the Second World War. There is no monument in China to commemorate them, apart from this modest edifice in the middle of the Henan countryside. It was put up a few years ago by a peasant who defied the silence that the communist leadership has always imposed on this unspeakable holocaust.