Population Change during China’s “Three Years of Hardship” (19591961)

Abstract

Much of the debate about population change following China’s “Great Leap Forward” has relied on the population statistics released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics in 1983. However, few have investigated the methods by which the statistics were gathered, and the extraordinary historical conditions of both population movement and its recording process in those affected decades before market reforms. This report offers such an investigation and notes dramatic discrepancies in demographic statistics between 1954 and 1982. It also examines what caused these discrepancies and argues that any research in famine deaths should not and cannot be separated from its larger context and the discussion of anomalous population change both before and after the Leap.

Keywords

• Great Leap Forward
• “famine deaths of 30 million”
• abnormal population change
• hukou system
• statistic compilation and analysis