When the Chinese Communist Party assumed power, Mao Zedong declared that “not even one person shall die of hunger.” A little over a decade later, China was in the midst of the most devastating famine in modern history. Between 1957 and 1962 – the years commonly associated with Mao’s Great Leap Forward – some 30 million peasants died of starvation and exhaustion.

Rather than exploring why party leaders stumbled so badly in their attempts to modernize China, the contributors to this landmark collection draw on newly available sources to show how men and women in rural and urban settings experienced the changes during this period. Eating Bitterness lifts the curtain of officially propagated images of mass mobilization to expose the uneven and deeply contested nature of state-society relations in Maoist China. It also illuminates the role that history writing and memory have played in shaping narratives of the recent past.