But even as people were dying in large numbers, officials did not think to save them. Their only concern was how to fulfill the delivery of grain, says Jisheng.

Illusion of superabundance

Communist doctrine holds private property as the source of all misery.

The assumption is that after collectivisation — when there is no more private property — the individuals would be self-motivated to work harder and production will increase to take care of everyone’s needs. Therefore, a communist utopia warrants a superabundance of grains.

However, the production of grain throughout China was decreasing from 1957–1961.

But the officials were under immense pressure to prove the communist doctrine right. The numbers being reported kept increasing, while the crop yields were in fact lower than average.

To match the inflated numbers, officials were seizing all the grain of a locality, leaving nothing for the local people to eat.

Anyone who disagreed was deemed a follower of 'conservative rightism' and an anti-communist. Such was the cynicism that the peasants were believed to be pretending to be hungry in order to sabotage the state grain purchase and punished.

Therefore, no one dared to question the exaggerated reports. No one could speak openly about the famine. Anyone who did so, faced harassment, incarceration or death.

Amidst this “superabundance”, the Communist party was telling people, ''Live with the utmost frugality and eat only two meals a day, one of which should be soft and liquid.''

Meanwhile, the planners further pushed the commercial crops, export of food grains to get foreign currency, and collectivisation.

Communist pseudoscience

The Chinese government didn’t stop at this.

The agricultural methods based on Communist pseudoscience that were implemented caused excessive damage.

One example would be Soviet Russia's Lysenkoism which rejected the “Western genetics” based on genes and natural selection. Lysenko laid the foundation of a communist “new biology”.

He argued that, much like the man in the Marxist theory, whose consciousness is defined by his material existence, agricultural crops can be modified by changes in their surroundings.

What followed was things like soaking seeds in the freezing water to train them for winter, and tripling the density of seedlings as the plants of the same species would cooperate, not compete with each other.

The farmers were told to plow extremely deeply into the soil (1 to 2 meters) to train the plants to develop strong roots.

The "Four Pests" campaign was introduced by Mao who called the birds “public animals of capitalism".

Citizens were called upon to destroy sparrows and other wild birds that ate crop seeds, and were rewarded for the same.

A contemporary issue of the US-based Time magazine quoted the Peking People’s Daily: