What Pingru called the ‘Three Years of Natural Disasters’ was a giant manmade catastrophe caused by the Great Leap Forward. Up to 1956, it was possible to argue that Mao’s role in the creation of the new China had had some positives. But the so-called ‘first phase of socialism’ was brought to a halt with the Great Leap Forward – a disastrous drive to industrialise the countryside using village forges, which ruined the environment, destroyed a household’s metal utensils and made metal too poor to be of any use.
