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Most readers of this book will know the famine that devastated China during the Great Leap Forward (1959–61) as the greatest of all time. Not all will know that the North China famine of 1876–79 (known in China at the time and for long afterward as the Incredible Famine) that is the subject of this book may have been the second greatest ever. Curiously, estimates of excess mortality in 1959–61 (from 15 million to over 30 million), range much more widely than those in 1876–79—when between 9.5 million and 13 million are supposed to have died.1 Specialist estimates of mortality during the Great Leap Forward famine have tended to fall over time, and a figure of 15 to 18 million now seems the most plausible.2 On that reckoning, the relative human cost of the earlier famine was considerably greater, given that China’s population was 650 million in the late 1950s but little more than half that (365 million) on the eve of the Incredible Famine. Thus the claim by American socialist James Maurer in 1912 that “1876 witnessed the commencement of a drought in the two great provinces of Honan and Shansi which has probably never been surpassed as the cause of such a vast amount of human suffering” may still hold true, or almost true.3 Almost certainly, the Incredible Famine was much more intense in its epicenter in Shanxi (as Shansi province is now known) than the Great Leap Forward famine was even in the worst hit provinces of Anhui or Sichuan.
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