Non-Existant surpluses procured by state organs were either exported or used to feed millions of new urban dwellers, and VAST amounts of labour were squandered on futile projects like backyard furnances. The result was unprecedented subsistence crisis in the COUNTRYSIDE.

Mao was severly criticized for this in a string of Party conferences from 1959, from which an elaborate-but as the Cultural revoution shwed, unstable-political compromise emerged.

Much of his authority passed to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

A Demographic Deficit (deaths pus lost births) of between 20 miion and 40 million accumalated by 1962.

Sichuan, Anhui worst affected, whole areas depopulated.

Hong Kong qued to mai food to desperate relatives knew a famine was occuring but careful information management regarding rural conditions concealed magnitude from them and others at home and abroad.

The cities survived through strict rationing, emergency production, grain imports, and by sending home new migrants.(editors note: province like a US state).

International assistance was SHUNNED.

Mao blamed the disaster on half-hearted implementation and his Great Proletarian Cultural Revoution was to some extent designed as a successor movement to the failed Great Leap Forward.

All aboves are quotes from the Dictionary of the Politics of the Peopl'e Republic of China by Colin Mackeras.

Dedicated to Xinying Guo in Atlanta