8. Mao’s Collectivization Disaster Killed More People Than Stalin’s Collectivization
As with the Soviet Union’s collectivization in the 1930s, China’s collectivization a few decades later rested on the hopes of higher returns from economies of scale. Big collectivized farms in theory should be more efficient and productive than small individual peasant plots. However, poor planning led to poor implementation of China’s collectivization, and the big fields ended up yielding less than private plots. Additionally, the Great Leap Forward emphasized ideological purity and fervor, rather than competence. So collectivization was led by enthusiastic and zealous overseers, instead of capable and competent managers. A series of natural disasters from 1959 to 1961 made things worse.
The result was history’s greatest man-made disaster. By 1960, it was obvious that the Great Leap Forward had been a bad decision, but by then it was too late. Diverting labor from farms to ill-advised industries such as backyard furnaces, plus the disruptions of collectivization, combined to produce a catastrophe. From 1959 to 1962, about 20 million Chinese starved to death, with some estimates going as high as 50 million.