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This fine collection contains an introduction and eleven essays, three of which have previously been published (two of those in Chinese). The first half of the book focuses broadly on ideological aspects of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, from its launch amid considerable fanfare in May 1958 to its dismantlement by Liu Shaoqui and his followers from mid-1960. There are chapters on the utopian euphoria and idealism that preceded and initially accompanied the Leap (Richard King, Kimberley Manning), on the associated ideology that made hunger a taboo subject (Felix Wemheuer), and on how the Leap radically socialized housing and dining arrangements (Xin Yi, Wang Yanni).
The remaining chapters are mainly about the ensuing famine. Gao Hua describes the widespread resort to substitute foods during the famine, Chen Yixin offers a comparative analysis of the famine in the neighbouring provinces of Anhui and Jiangsi, Jeremy Brown uses Tianjin, a city of 3.5 million people in 1958, as a case-study of the famine in the city, while Ralph Thaxton and Gao Wangling describe peasant resistance during the famine.
The famine's intensity varied considerably across provinces. This has prompted economists and economic historians to apply statistical techniques to province-level data in attempts at accounting for the variation (for a sophisticated example see Kung and Chen's 2011 article "The tragedy of the Nomenklatura; career incentives and political radicalism...