Between 1958 and 1962, forty-five million Chinese were killed by forced labor, violence and famine to which they were subjected by the Mao Zedong government. Obsessed with the frantic company of the Great Leap Forward, his initiative, aimed at overcoming the Western economic model in less than fifteen years, caused one of the greatest human catastrophes in history. Thanks to an exhaustive investigation of the recently opened provincial and municipal archives of China, Dikötter gives voice to the victims of the regime and demonstrates for the first time that the implacable fate of the people on foot was not an accident, but the direct result, and to a large extent calculated, of the decisions in the highest spheres of power. The great famine in Mao's China opens a new breach in the wall that still separates the current China, heir to the Maoism established in 1949, from the rest of the world.