Most of the world is generally familiar with the fact that China experienced a great famine in 1959-1961. The death tolls published in the West tend to be greatly exaggerated, some reaching 80 million lives or more, but from everything I can learn from the original sources the actual total appears to be about 20 million lives or perhaps a bit more. In discussing the cause, the Western media, columnists, authors, and book publishers casually mention the series of natural disasters, the multiple large typhoons, persistent excessive rainstorms, plant diseases that simultaneously inflicted China, but tend unanimously to focus on and allocate the blame to Mao Zedong. The official Western narrative is that Mao so terrified all his lieutenants that they reported totally fictitious grain harvest volumes so as to avoid possible repercussions, which resulted in Mao misallocating most of the food distribution and therefore now shoulders almost all the blame for those deaths. It's a good story but, as with most history emanating from the West, it's not true.