Mao's Great Famine

Winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2011

Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death.
Mao
Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an
attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than
fifteen years. It lead to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has
ever known.

Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese
archives brings together for the first time what happened in the
corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people,
giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking
account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of
China.