The Great Leap was a frenzied lurch from socialism into Communism, conceived by the Chairman and spurred by his ambition to overtake Moscow as the leader of international Communism. Communism being the future, success in the Great Leap would place the Middle Kingdom, materially and politically, back at the centre of the world.

Hence the drive to expand and industrialise the towns in a matter of years. The swelling army of workers was to be fed by enforced procurements from peasants stripped of their livestock, tools and garden plots, conscripted into production teams and herded with their families into communal kitchens. The peasants disliked the communes and collectivisation was a colossal failure. With all personal incentives to production gone, as the towns ate more agricultural produce shrank dramatically.

Within a year and a half mass starvation began. Driven to desperation, and, in the worst areas, to cannibalism, some peasants attacked grain storage facilities, trains transporting food to towns, or Communist Party cadres whose numbers had been hugely increased and whose cruelty was at once highly imaginative and beyond imagination. Punishments for "right-deviationists" or "counter-revolutionaries"— often starving peasants — went beyond the usual criticism meetings and vicious beatings. One report spoke of cadres "driving pine needles into the gums, ‘lighting the celestial candle' (lighted embers forced into the mouth), branding the nipples, tearing out pubic hair, penetration of the genitals and being buried alive".

Yet as millions died or were driven to devour one another as the state-imposed famine continued, there was no mass revolt. Yang's explanation is that under Mao a combination of Soviet-style autocracy and Chinese despotism in 20th-century form produced a level of dread that "seeped into the nerves and blood, becoming part of the person's instinct for survival".

The atmosphere of terror was not confined to ordinary people. Ideologically-induced blindness and party loyalty ensured that it operated in the higher echelons too. Twenty years later Deng Xiaoping said: "During the Great Leap Forward, was it only Mao Zedong who was so fanatical and none of the rest of us? Neither Comrade Liu Shaoqi nor Comrade Zhou Enlai nor I opposed him."