50 years ago, Chinese leader Mao Jie Dong announced a plan to modernize his country.
It was named ‘Great Leap Forward. But as a result, there was a severe famine in China. It is considered one of the worst cases of humanitarian disaster in the 20th century.
Mao Jie Dong then took the initiative to build China’s agricultural economy as an industry very quickly. But the initiative failed and between 1959 and 1961 years, China experienced the most severe famine in human history. At least three million people died in it. He was such a famine that many people would be shocked to hear his description.
Eyewitnesses have said that the famine was in the ‘witness of history’. Why was that great famine? The reason lies in the history of the first years of Mao Jie Dong’s democracy. Ever since the capture of power in 1949, Mao Jie Dong and his fellow communists had vowed to change China – to turn China into a modern industrialized country.
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For this reason the factories were taken over by the state ownership, and the farmers were organized by the commune. Farmers have been engaged in the manufacture of steel in small furnaces locally for self-sufficiency in iron and steel. But the production targets set in the industrial and agricultural sectors were not realistic.
As promised, large quantities of food could not be provided in reality, then famine appeared. People started to eat these leaves, rats, tree insects, dogs – all of them for survival. Many people have even eaten human flesh at that time.
A Chinese journalist named Young Ji Shen wrote a book about the direct experience of the famine. His father also died during that famine.
Young Ji Shen talked to people from all over China to write the book. Collecting memories of the famine heard in their faces, and recording the true stories of the time.
He thinks that 36 million people died in that famine in China from 1949 to 1962. In some areas, 40 percent or more of the population died.
Young Ji Shen named the book ‘Tombstone’ in his father’s memory. The book is still banned in China today.