Sofa King Podcast

On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we travel back in time and examine the largest famine in human history, The Great Chinese Famine. Known to the Chinese government as “Three Years of Difficulties,” this famine is unique since it is blamed almost entirely on human governance, not on nature. How bad did it get? Estimates are that 45 million people died in only three years. Most of this was starvation, but much of it was people being killed to keep the famine a secret. This one gets ugly. People eating bark, people eating poisonous mud, parents eating kids, kids eating parents, some villages simply killing any travelers and eating them. So what was the cause of this horrible disaster? People blame Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” Mao wanted to propel China forward to catch up with production levels of Britain and the US, so he shifted his focus from agriculture to the manufacture of steel and goods. He even went so far as to move people off of their farms and made almost everyone mine t