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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.
According to government statistics, there were 15 million excess deaths in this period. However, the Chinese government at this time was taken over by market reformers who were strongly opposed to the Great Leap Forward. Unofficial estimates vary, but scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million.