From The Spoon Of Mao Case Study

From the spoon of Chairman Mao: communism and starvation in twentieth century China, by Colvin Null
1. The Famines of Chairman Mao
In the late 1940’s, China was devastated and bankrupt from the inner conflicts and civil war they were having in their country. The people of China were desperate for a new system of government because their current government was not getting the job done, but little did China know what they were about to have to go through with a communist style government.
The Chinese people hope the new government would bring peace and prosperity to the country. Chairman Mao and the high officials of the government promised that the citizens would always have plenty of food and clothes. Also, Mao gave females the same rights

This sparked the great leap forward. Mao believed agriculture and industry needed to grow at the same time. No matter if there was sunlight or moonlight, the people still had to work. The communes allowed for no kind of family life. The babies would stay at home while the older people would go work. The peasants had to eat on the job and sometimes even sleep there. Mao told the farmers that the harder they worked they could overtake England and catch up with America. This gave the people motivation to work as hard as they possibly could. Also, the peasants had to find any scrap metal and melt it into steel for the buildings. This took valuable people from production agriculture to have to make steel. Not only did it hurt the crop production, the methods the peasants had to use to make the steel was very primitive and was basically useless. In attempt to make Mao happy, the commune officials, who worked for the government, would lie about the grain production. Even though they were only producing a certain amount of grain, the officials told Mao the farmers were producing multiple times the grain than they actually were. The officials looked at this as a game and every time a commune outdid their production numbers, they would lie again and create even a high total of grains. Therefore, Mao was taking all the grain the communes were producing. The Chinese people were starving because they were not getting any grain to eat. No one would speak up to Mao because the people were scared of him. The farmers had to resort to eating bark, grass, and even dirt. When people started to die of starvation, the Chinese were too weak to move the dead bodies or keep the rats off of them. An estimated 30 million people died in this 3-year time frame of no food. The government blamed it on floods and droughts, but behind closed doors, they