Great Leap Forward was a mass mobilization of rural workers in water works projects, backyard steel production, and other projects initiated by Mao Zedong after the Soviet pulled out of helping China with industrial development. Using mass mobilization instead of investing in capital investment, the goal was to surpass Great Britain in steel production in fifteen years. According to Frank Dikotter in his book Mao’s Great Famine, it was determined to have caused the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962 which killed 30 to 35 million people.
According to Tsien’s critics, he contributed scientific credibility to Mao’s plan by doing calculations that suggested farmer productivity could be increased twenty-fold.
