The causes of China's great leap famine, 1959-1961

Abstract

Aroused by the unexpected magnitude of excess deaths estimated by Western demographers, recently there has been a revival of interest in the causes of the Great Chinese famine of 1958-61. Depending on the underlying assumptions and methodologies employed, the excess deaths of this famine are estimated to range from a minimum of 16.5 million to as many as 30 million. With a population of roughly 660 million in 1958, the year marking the origin of this famine, 30 million amounted to a loss of close to 5% of the country's population. Moreover, the loss of lives of this magnitude occurred within an incredibly short period of time; within 2 years the country's death rate was doubled from slightly below 12 per thousand in 1958 to 25 per thousand in 1960, making it "the worst famine in human history." The remainder of this article is organized as follows. The next section provides an account of China's Great Leap Forward, the context within which the famine occured. Specifically, we focus on the main elements of this institutional change to provide the necessary background for motivating the empirical analysis. The exact hypotheses are then spelled out in Section III, which ends with a detailed discussion of the proxies used in the empirical tests. In Section IV we specify our method for estimating these hypotheses and introduce the data sources. The estimation results are then presented and discussed in Section V. Section VI provides a brief conclusion. © 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.