ANS. Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party implemented the Great Leap Forward, a five-year economic plan that began in 1958 and ended in 1961.
The goal was to use communist economic ideologies to modernise the country’s agricultural sector.
The Great Leap Forward, rather than stimulating the country’s economy, resulted in mass starvation and famine.
Famine, execution, and forced labour, as well as massive economic and environmental destruction, are estimated to have killed between 30 and 45 million Chinese citizens.
The Great Leap Forward remains the largest non-wartime mass killing in human history, and a clear example of socialism’s and economic central planning’s failures.