As reports of mass famine turned from a trickle to a flood in 1960, the leadership slowly realized that the party had made a mistake of historical proportion. According to Ministry of Public Security data, 675 counties and cities had death rates exceeding 2 percent of population in the early 1960s, compared to the normal 1 percent or so. In forty counties, mainly in Anhui, Sichuan, Henan, Guizhou, and Qinghai, the death rates exceeded 10 percent of the population (Yang et al. 2012: 395). Economists and demographers estimate that the Great Leap Forward caused sixteen to thirty million unnatural deaths in the early 1960s (Kung and Lin 2003). The policy of using confiscated grain to finance a rapid buildup of industrial capacity championed by Mao and his colleagues had led to one of the greatest man-made disasters in the twentieth century.

The Conclusion reviews the arguments made in the previous chapters and argues the importance of the Donggu Revolutionary Base Area for understanding the Chinese revolution. It is impossible to ignore the conflicts between the local interests of the Donggu revolutionaries and Mao’s efforts to create a national revolution. It is also impossible to ignore the conflict between the Communist movement’s need for soldiers and money and the unwillingness of local society to provide either in sufficient quantity.