When Food Became Scarce

When Food Became Scarce is about the Great Leap Famine of 1958-61. Yixin Chen adopts a grassroots level analysis to explore an existential question concerning hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants: why did some peasants perish while others from the same villages facing the same collective problems of food scarcity survive? Viewing the famine as a persistent ordeal, Chen identifies environment and lineage as two pivotal factors that influenced the rural populace's destiny. When food quotas und