The Great Famine and Recovery under Liu and Deng, 1959-65
A Famine Made by Policy
Between 1959 and 1962, China suffered the largest peacetime loss of life in modern history. Historians’ estimates of the dead range from around 15 million to 45 million. The dominant cause was not weather. It was a chain of policy decisions: the people’s communes of 1958, communal mess halls that ate through grain reserves, Lysenkoist farming methods that wrecked the 1959 harvest, the diversion of around 60 million peasants from fields to backyard steel, and forced state procurement quotas based on inflated reports. The CCP for decades called the period ‘three years of natural disasters’. The historiography of the past thirty years — Frank Dikötter, Yang Jisheng, Roderick MacFarquhar — has dismantled that framing.
Historians estimate 15–45 million deaths in the Great Famine of 1958–62. Frank Dikötter argues for c.45 million (Mao’s Great Famine, 2010) and Yang Jisheng for c.36 million (Tombstone). The CCP’s long-standing label ‘three years of natural disasters’ framed the famine as weather-driven; modern scholarship treats it as policy-driven.
Causes of the Famine
The famine had multiple causes layered over the same harvest. The first was structural: the communes destroyed peasant incentives to produce. Private plots were banned; communal mess halls served the same meals to everyone whether they worked or not. The second was scientific: grain procurement quotas were set on the basis of inflated yield figures sent up from local cadres who feared denunciation if they reported the truth. Provinces sent grain to the cities and to the export market while villages starved.
The third was personal. After Peng Dehuai was purged at the Lushan Conference in July 1959, no senior CCP figure was willing to challenge Mao directly. Procurement quotas were maintained or raised in 1959 and 1960 even as the harvest collapsed. The fourth was external: in July 1960 Khrushchev withdrew the c.10,000 Soviet advisers in the wake of the deepening Sino-Soviet split, removing technical help at the worst moment. Weather was a factor — floods and drought in 1960 hit some provinces hard — but the policy framework determined who lived and died.
For decades the CCP framed the Great Famine as weather-driven. Modern historians disagree. Frank Dikötter (Mao’s Great Famine) and Yang Jisheng (Tombstone) argue that the structures of the Great Leap — communes, mess halls, banned private farming, Lysenkoism, inflated reporting and forced procurement — were the dominant cause. Weather mattered in 1960 but cannot explain why grain continued to be exported, why procurement was maintained after Lushan, or why the famine peaked in provinces with the most aggressive cadres rather than the worst weather. Strong answers identify the famine as a policy disaster amplified, not caused, by weather.
The Sino-Soviet Split, July 1960
The deteriorating relationship with Moscow reached its breaking point in 1960. Mao’s ideological attacks on Khrushchev’s ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West, and Khrushchev’s contempt for the Great Leap, led to the formal withdrawal of Soviet advisers in July. Half-completed projects from the First Five-Year Plan stalled. Loans had to be repaid in grain at exactly the moment the famine was at its worst. The Sino-Soviet split confirmed Mao’s view that China should rely on its own efforts, but it removed an external check that might have moderated the disaster.
The 7,000 Cadres Conference, January 1962
By late 1961 the famine could no longer be denied inside the leadership. At the 7,000 Cadres Conference in January 1962 — the largest internal meeting in CCP history — Liu Shaoqi stood up and said publicly that the famine was ‘30% natural disaster, 70% man-made’. Mao made a partial self-criticism. Power began to shift. Liu Shaoqi, as President of the PRC since 1959, took daily charge of the economy together with Deng Xiaoping, who was General Secretary of the CCP. Mao retreated to a less operational role — but never forgave the moment.
Recovery under Liu and Deng, 1962–65
Liu and Deng’s recovery measures are best summarised by the slogan sanzi yibao — ‘three freedoms and one contract’. Private plots were restored, free rural markets reopened, small private sideline industries were allowed, and household production contracts let families farm a piece of communal land in return for delivering a fixed quota. Communal mess halls were quietly closed. Industry was rebalanced: backyard steel was abandoned, fertiliser plants were built, and Soviet-style machine-tool factories rebuilt the urban industrial base. Chen Yun returned as the leading economic planner.
By 1965 grain output had recovered to roughly pre-Leap levels. Industrial output exceeded 1957 levels. Famine deaths ended. The recovery was framed in the language of socialism — Liu and Deng never proposed liberal markets — but for Mao it looked like surrender. He saw Liu and Deng as ‘capitalist roaders’ restoring the old order under a new label. The political conflict that recovery created became the launching pad for the Cultural Revolution of 1966.
Students often present Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping as anti-Mao throughout. The truth is more layered. Both backed the Great Leap in 1958. Both shifted only in 1961–62 once the human cost was undeniable. Their reforms used socialist language — ‘three freedoms’ and ‘one contract’ — not liberal-market language. Frank Dikötter (The Cultural Revolution) reads them as cautious pragmatists, not market reformers. Mobo Gao argues their changes were modest and that even at their height the commune framework remained. Strong answers describe the recovery as a course correction within the socialist framework, not a Western-style liberalisation, and explain why Mao misread it as a counter-revolution.
The recovery slogan sanzi yibao covered: private plots restored, free rural markets, private sideline industries, and household production contracts. By 1965 grain and industrial output had recovered to pre-Leap levels — but Mao saw the policy package as a betrayal that justified the Cultural Revolution.