Blain's Farm & Fleet is a regional chain of 38 retail stores in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa.
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.
Yellow River Flood of 1887. China has had a particularly long and terrible history of flooding. In the last 2000 years, the Yangtze River has flooded more than 1000 times. But it is the Hwang Ho or Yellow River that has been responsible for China's most catastrophic floods.