In 1984 American demographers calculated that at least 30 million people had starved to death in China between 1958 and 1962. This text aims to unravel the story behind these statistics and to describe how Mao Zedong created a man-made famine.;Mao's Great Leap Forward was the greatest example of Utopian engineering ever attempted. He tried to abolish money and property, and create the first Communist paradise on Earth. Instead, even in the richest regions, peasants died in their millions while the rest became gaunt skeletons. Through graphic eyewitness accounts, the author describes a catalogue of terror, cannibalism, slavery, torture and imprisonment.