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In 1958, China's revered leader Mao Zedong instituted a program designed to transform his giant nation into a Communist utopia. Called the Great Leap Forward, Mao's grand scheme-like so many other utopian dreams of the 20th century-proved a monumental disaster, resulting in the mass destruction of China's agriculture, industry, and trade while leaving large portions of the countryside forever scarred by man-made environmental disasters. The resulting three-year famine claimed the lives of more than 45 million people in China. In this remarkable oral history of modern China's greatest tragedy, survivors of the cataclysm share their memories of the devastation and loss. The range of voices is wide: city dwellers and peasants, scholars and factory workers, parents who lost children and children who were orphaned in the catastrophe all speak out. Powerful and deeply moving, this unique remembrance of an unnecessary and unhindered catastrophe illuminates a dark recent history that remains officially unacknowledged to this day by the Chinese government and opens a window on a society still feeling the impact of the terrible Great Famine.

Until recently, few people in mainland China would dispute the significance of the hukou (household registration) system in affecting their lives – indeed, in determining their fates. At the macro level, the centrality of this system has led some to argue that the industrialization strategy and the hukou system were the crucial organic parts of the Maoist model: the strategy could not have been implemented without the system. A number of China scholars in the West, notably Christiansen, Chan, Cheng and Seiden, Solinger, and Mallee, have begun in recent years to study this important subject in relation to population mobility and its social and economic ramifications. Unlike population registration systems in many other countries, the Chinese system was designed not merely to provide population statistics and identify personal status, but also directly to regulate population distribution and serve many other important objectives desired by the state. In fact, the hukou system is one of the major tools of social control employed by the state. Its functions go far beyond simply controlling population mobility.

The first edition of \"The Political Economy of Chinese Socialism\" reconceptualized the political economy of China by highlighting the changing character of urban-rural and state-society conflicts in the era of Mao Zedong's leadership and in the contemporary post-Mao reforms. The economic and social crises that engulfed China - and indeed much of the rest of the socialist world - in the late 1980s, culminating in the 1989 democratic movement and its suppression, stimulated a rethinking of central propositions of the first edition. It particularly led the author to inquire anew into the meaning of socio-political as well as economic development in a populous and poor agrarian nation. This volume, then, assesses the economic performance and social consequences of China's political economy over four decades, with a focus on China's countryside and city-countryside relations. In addition to a reconceptualization and updating of the introductory chapter, there is a new chapter, \"The Social Origins and Limits of the Chinese Democratic Movement\".

In the spring of 1962, a mass exodus took place in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, the Sino-Soviet borderland in northwest Xinjiang. More than 67,000 border inhabitants, most of whom were ethnic Kazaks, managed to flee to the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. While the mass exodus had a wide-ranging impact, the factors that caused this incident remain debatable. Using archival documents from Xinjiang and Beijing, the author argues that both domestic and foreign causes contributed to this incident. In addition to the great famine, multiple factors played important roles in causing the mass exodus, including state policies regarding the Sino-Soviet commerce, ethnic tensions between the Han and the local ethnic peoples, political campaigns targeting at ethnic elites, and the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations. It is also revealed that only after the 1962 incident did Beijing successfully transform the fragile suzerainty of Xinjiang's three districts, Ili, Tacheng, and Altay, into full sovereignty. In this regard, the birth of modern Xinjiang, as a frontier borderland of PRC China, occurred only in 1962 rather than in 1949.

This article examines how Mao’s grand strategy for Cold War competition inflicted a catastrophic agricultural failure in China and victimized tens of millions of Chinese peasants. It argues that Khrushchev’s 1957 boast about the Soviet Union surpassing the United States in key economic areas inspired Mao to launch an industrialization program that would push the People’s Republic past Great Britain in some production categories within fifteen years. Beginning in 1958 Mao imposed unrealistic targets on Chinese grain production to extract funds from agriculture for rapid industrial growth. Maoists placed relentless pressure on communist cadres for ruthless implementation of the Great Leap Forward. Contrary to Maoist plans, China’s grain output in 1959-1960 declined sharply from 1957 levels and rural per capita grain retention decreased dramatically. Throughout China, party cadres’ mismanagement of agricultural production was responsible for the decline in grain output, and the communist state’s excessive requisition of grain caused food shortages for the peasants. But the key factor determining the famine’s uneven impact on the peasantry in the provinces was the degree to which provincial leaders genuinely and energetically embraced Maoist programs. This is illustrated by a close examination of the Great Leap famine in Anhui Province.

This article examines how Mao's grand strategy for Cold War competition inflicted a catastrophic agricultural failure in China and victimized tens of millions of Chinese peasants. It argues that Khrushchev's 1957 boast about the Soviet Union surpassing the United States in key economic areas inspired Mao to launch an industrialization program that would push the People's Republic past Great Britain in some production categories within fifteen years. Beginning in 1958 Mao imposed unrealistic targets on Chinese grain production to extract funds from agriculture for rapid industrial growth. Maoists placed relentless pressure on communist cadres for ruthless implementation of the Great Leap Forward. Contrary to Maoist plans, China's grain output in 1959-1960 declined sharply from 1957 levels and rural per capita grain retention decreased dramatically. Throughout China, party cadres' mismanagement of agricultural production was responsible for the decline in grain output, and the communist state's excessive requisition of grain caused food shortages for the peasants. But the key factor determining the famine's uneven impact on the peasantry in the provinces was the degree to which provincial leaders genuinely and energetically embraced Maoist programs. This is illustrated by a close examination of the Great Leap famine in Anhui Province.