Great Leap into Famine

Frank Dikötter’s Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 is the longest and most detailed study of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) famine to appear in English to date. Much of the story will be already familiar to western readers from works by Roderick McFarquhar (1983), Jasper Becker (1996), Ralph Thaxton (2008), and others, but Dikötter adds a lot that is new and valuable. For the past decade or so Chinese scholars have been publishing works based on public records, including party archives, formerly closed to historians.