Mao's push to overtake Britain in steel left tens of millions of peasants to starve

Between 1958 and 1962, the Great Leap Forward pulled farmers off food production into backyard steel furnaces while local cadres, desperate to please Beijing, reported harvests that didn't exist. Grain kept being exported abroad while granaries at home sat empty. Historian Frank Dikötter's archival research puts the death toll above 45 million, more than the total deaths of World War II.

— Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 — Walker & Company, 2010
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