Bad News, Good Lives
Why don’t our perceptions of the larger world match our lived experience?
The biggest famine of the twentieth century didn’t appear in the local news.
Between 1958 and 1961, 30 million Chinese people died due to catastrophic food shortages. The food supply was affected by some natural disasters during this period, but these deaths were mostly the fault of the Chinese government.
The communist regime, headed by Mao Zedong, instituted a new economic policy in 1958 called the “Great Leap Forward,” which was supposed to catapult China into the ranks of the major industrial powers. People were instructed to make steel in “backyard furnaces” and almost all of the country’s agricultural land was organized into massive communes where everything would be shared.
None of this worked — food production declined — but Mao refused to consider the evidence that his policies were causing profound human suffering. He purged the Communist Party of anyone who questioned his policies and continued to ship food away from the starving rural areas and into the cities, where foreign visitors might have noticed shortages. He even continued to export food to the Soviet Union while millions starved to death rather than admit to his rival Nikita Khrushchev that things weren’t going well in China.
