The Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. In 1955, the collectivisation of farming land, and forced industrialisation of China caused a huge famine that is estimated to have led to 20 to 50 million deaths. In 1970s a virtual civil war was also marked by severe famine in death. That the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution caused huge amounts of death and famine is widely known. I had assumed that when I began to look at Chinese food supply, I would see a marked convergence in Chinese farming yields to Western farming yields beginning in the 1980s.
