How the CCP Starved Chinese Peasants to Death in the 1950s

Mao Zedong said that showing mercy to peasants was akin to helping American imperialism.

Employees of the Shin Chiao Hotel build in the hotel courtyard (background) a small and rudimentary smelting steel furnace during the "Great Leap Forward," a period intended to help China to catch up to Great Britain's economy within 15 years, in Beijing in October 1958. The ensuing famine cost China some 40 million lives. Jacquet Francillon/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

If the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) land reform was the violent expropriation of property from landlords, then its “Unified Purchase and Sale” policy was an extended and systematic plunder of China’s peasants—a policy that, at its core, amounted to legalized seizure under the guise of planned economy.