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.
Chinese villagers welcome the arrival of tractors purchased by a farmers' cooperative in April 1958, during the Great Leap Forward campaign. The disastrous modernization program ended in China's great famine and tens of millions of deaths.t was April 1959, a year after China launched its Great Leap Forward, a political movement forcing the population to drop everything and make steel in backyard furnaces so China could catch up with the U.S. and Britain.