Born Then1959–1961
Life during the Great Leap Forward famine
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
Mao's campaign to collectivise farming and industrialise overnight led to fantasy harvest reports, excessive grain procurement and the collapse of farming. The resulting famine was the deadliest in recorded history, worst in Anhui, Sichuan and Gansu.
Deaths: about 15–45 million; most scholars put it at 30 million or more.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Korea under Japanese rule 1910–1945
- Great Migration of Black Americans 1916–1970
- Great Depression 1929–1939
- Dust Bowl 1930–1939
- Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia 1935–1941
- Spanish Civil War 1936–1939
- Second Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945
- World War II on the Eastern Front 1939–1945
- World War II in Western Europe 1939–1945
- World War II for the United States, Canada and Australia 1939–1945
- The Holocaust 1941–1945
- World War II in Japan 1941–1945
- Japanese occupation of the Philippines 1941–1945
- Japanese occupation of Indonesia, Burma and Vietnam 1942–1945
- Bracero program and Mexican migration to the United States 1942–2007
- Bengal famine of 1943 1943–1944
- Indonesian War of Independence 1945–1949
- Chinese Civil War 1946–1949
- Partition of India 1947–1948
- Apartheid 1948–1994
- Division of Germany 1949–1990
- Korean War 1950–1953
- Italian economic miracle and the move north 1950–1970
- Egyptian revolution of 1952 and land reform 1952–1961
- Mau Mau uprising and the Kenya Emergency 1952–1960
- Algerian War and French conscription 1954–1962
- Japanese postwar economic boom 1955–1973
- Vietnam War 1955–1975
- Great Leap Forward famine 1959–1961
- Turkish labour migration to West Germany 1961–1973