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Even so, work by Yang and others has proved that senior leaders in Beijing knew of the famine as early as 1958. To distribute resources evenly will only ruin the Great Leap Forward, Mao warned colleagues a year later. When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death.
However, if a mid-estimate of 30 million deaths is accepted, the Great Leap Forward was the deadliest famine in the history of China and in the history of the world. This was in part due to Chinaâs large population; in the Great Irish Famine, approximately 1 million of a population of 8 million people died, or 12.5%.