For millennia, China suffered famine after famine. As recently as 1981, as many as 88 percent of the Chinese population was living in extreme poverty; today it is less than 1 per cent. Never in the history of the world have so many hundreds of millions of people risen from abject poverty to the middle class in such a short period of time.
But it all began with a tragedy. In late 1957, Mao Zedong proclaimed the “Great Leap Forward” as a shortcut to the supposed workers’ paradise. According to Mao, China would be able to overtake the UK within 15 years, thus proving once and for all that socialism was superior to capitalism. The most ambitious socialist experiment in history started with tens of millions of farmers across the country being forced into working on massive irrigation projects without sufficient food or rest. Soon, one in six Chinese was busy digging for large-scale dam and canal-building projects. During the Great Leap Forward, private ownership of any kind was abolished, and peasants were forced to leave their properties and live in factory-like barracks with up to 20,000 fellow sufferers.
This experiment resulted in what was probably the worst famine........