China accrued approximately $650 million (by 1956) of war debts to the Soviet Union as a result of the Korean War and necessity to industrialize.

Great Leap Forward 1958-1961, Mao Zedong in an effort to sustain/recover China's industrialization.

In an attempt to gain mass popularity, Mao Zedong used his political support to segregate Chinese society into separate non-official castes, Party members, party cadres, and peasantry.

All people were forced out of their homes and stripped of their property rights and sent to state-owned communes governed by cadres in most southern provinces.

These cadres were responsible for organizing/reporting output and sending income to the central government. In return for this service, they were given education, policing authority, and welfare benefits (better housing/local priority food access). The vast majority of these cadres were ordered by the central government to produce crops assigned to them by the central government, Mao Zedong was the primary agent who determined what was to be produced. As a result, many lands were mismanaged and seeded with the wrong types of crop to sustain the local populations.

Mao Zedong ordered an increase of payments to Russia in the form of agricultural/steel output(they would sell the raw materials on a financial market, get cash and pay back the debt) to decrease debt.

Mao Zedong had zero competency in metallurgy and promoted the use of backyard furnaces which were makeshift smelters designed to melt iron objects to form pig iron, which was to be shipped to steel mills to product steel. This process required skilled ironmaster to ensure that quality pig iron could be produced. However due to Mao's policy of executing/defrauding the vast majority of the skilled labor force, only select regions with traditions of ironworking managed to produce a half decent quantity of pig iron to output steel.

As a result of the failure to produce more steel, Mao Zedong increased the required agriculture state payments from every region.

This increase in agricultural demands was physically impossible, and under performing cadres were punished by having their privileges stripped by the party.

As a result rampant misreporting of output was made on agricultural output, the cadres would keep food for themselves (to eat and live) and send the rest to the government.

Then the cadres, in order to contain any reports of starvation by peasantry, locked in peasants and jailed any person without permits from leaving the communes.

If any one protested, they were beaten to death. Cadres would purposefully under report death rates to the central government, sometimes accounting only 1/4 the amount of people dying per month.

Reports of cannibalism/corruption were censored then destroyed by cadres.

This forced starvation during the Great Leap Forward was the sole responsibility of Mao Zedong who ordered the acceleration of payments, who orchestrated the entire organization/execution of the commune system. During this period was given a hgih estimate of 45 million people died by Frank Dikötte who somehow gained access to provincial archives and the Public Security Bureau reports.