By unleashing China’s greatest asset, a labour force that was counted in the hundreds of millions, Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Instead of following the Soviet model of development, which leaned heavily towards industry alone, China would ‘walk on two legs’: the peasant masses were mobilised to transform both agriculture and industry at the same time, converting a backward economy into a modern communist society of plenty for all.
This is a story of Zhao Xiaobai, then aged eleven, a soft-spoken woman with sad eyes. A few years before the Great Leap Forward her family left their native village in Henan to join a migration programme. Her father was made to break ice in the mountains but died of hunger in 1959. Her mother was too ill to work.
