Tens of millions of people died in China in the famines that followed the start of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), a bid by then supreme leader Mao Zedong to catch up with U.S. levels of development in just a few years. Estimates of the total range from the official 10 million figure, to at least 45 million. But more recently, reports have begun to emerge suggesting that not all of those deaths were from disease or starvation.
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