The People’s Republic of China 141
In fact, grain production was rapidly plummeting. Peasants resented
the loss of their private plots and in some cases butchered their draft
animals rather than hand them over to the collective. The mass cafete-
rias produced poor-quality food that everyone resented and that caused
massive waste. The backyard steel furnaces produced nothing but use-
less brittle pig iron, and the massive labor mobilizations took peasants
away from the fi elds at crucial times in the planting and harvesting
cycle. All these mistakes cumulatively produced the largest man-made
famine in world history. In the “three hard years,” 1959–61, an esti-
mated thirty million Chinese starved to death or died from disease and
other complications of malnutrition.
The Great Leap Forward was the fi rst catastrophic failure of Mao
Zedong’s leadership. At a high Party meeting in the summer of 1959,
defense minister Peng Dehuai wrote Mao a private letter expressing
his concern about the disastrous mistakes of the misguided campaign.
Mao reacted with bitterness, circulated the letter to other leaders,
threatened to go “back to the mountains” and organize another Red
Army to seize power anew, and demanded Peng Dehuai’s resignation
for his “betrayal” of the revolution. No one else was willing to resist
Mao or speak up for Peng, who was dismissed from his posts. Mao did
step down from his position as president of the People’s Republic, and
he turned over the daily administration of the government to the new
president, Liu Shaoqi, and his deputy, Deng Xiaoping. They relaxed
the Great Leap policies, disbanded the cafeterias, and restored private
plots. The economy made a slow recovery as Mao backed away from
his utopian policies, at least for the time being.
In the 1960s, China became increasingly isolated diplomatically both
from the West and from the Soviet Union. In 1959, Tibetan Buddhists
rose in open revolt against Beijing, and the People’s Liberation Army sent
troops into Tibet. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political leader of
Tibet, fl ed to India. China had tolerated most practices of Tibetan Bud-
dhism in the 1950s but now began to close monasteries and temples and to
forbid the open practice of Buddhism. China bitterly criticized the Soviet
Union in 1960 for its policy of peaceful coexistence with the United States.
In 1962, China soundly defeated India in a border dispute in the Himala-
yan Mountains. These actions all served to alarm the Western world about
China’s power and its expansive intentions. To further feed such fears,
China detonated its fi rst atomic bomb in 1964, thanks to the work of
Western-trained Chinese physicists who had returned to China in 1949.
From 1962 to 1966, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping tried to restore
a sense of order and predictability to Chinese life. During these few