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Historic Ideas That Aged Like Complete Garbage

Khalid Elhassan July 11, 2020 35 min

Madame Nhu - South Vietnam — Protests in Saigon. People's World

5. Collectivization Catastrophe

Chinese villagers welcome the arrival of tractors purchased by a farmers’ cooperative in April 1958, during the Great Leap Forward campaign. The disastrous modernization program ended in China’s great famine and tens of millions of deaths. NPR

As a result of mismanagement and wishful thinking, collectivization ended up being 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 idea, but by then it was too late. The diversion of labor from farms to ill-advised industries such as backyard furnaces, plus the disruptions of collectivization, combined to produce a catastrophe. Between 1959 to 1962, about 20 million Chinese starved to death, and some estimate that the casualties might have been as high as 50 million.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.