The Sino-Soviet Split
by Lorenz M Luthi
His book is now the standard account of the Sino-Soviet conflict. We’ve long known that something like 30 million Chinese starved to death during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, his disastrous effort to industrialise China in 1958-61. We’d always assumed, though, that he didn’t know about this – that Mao’s underlings kept it from him. Lorenz shows conclusively that this was not the case.
