Great Leap Forward
Mao's rush to industrialise brings a catastrophic famine
In 1958 Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward: peasants were herded into people's communes and millions smelted steel in backyard furnaces. Impossible targets and inflated harvest reports led to the famine of 1959–1961, which killed between 15 and 45 million people by various estimates.
Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 19 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 11 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 10 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 9 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 22 years later
Europe
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 25 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 22 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 17 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 5 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 1 year earlier
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 17 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 16 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 13 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 1 year earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 3 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 10 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 21 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 22 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 2 years earlier
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — same year
- 1960 Year of Africa — 2 years later
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 5 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 9 years later
Americas
- 1959 Cuban Revolution — 1 year later
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 2 years later
- 1969 Moon landing — 11 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 12 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 25 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 22 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 17 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 16 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 4 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 1 year later
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 84)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 77)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 69)
- Mao Zedong (aged 65)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 40)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 29)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 28)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 24)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 74)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 69)