Actually, the Great Leap Forward was much more a Great Lurch Backward. In the rush to boost production, agriculture was seriously disrupted as farmers had been diverted into futile backyard steel production or half-baked engineering schemes. The man-made chaos was compounded by three years of disastrous weather. Up to 20 million people died in the ensuing famine. One of those who condemned the Great Leap Forward was the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.

The friendship in between the CPR and also the Soviet Union had long been under strain, but in 1960 it turned into outright hostility as Soviet engineers and scientists were recalled to the USSR and Soviet aid dried up. The fiasco from the Excellent Leap Forward seriously damaged Mao’s prestige. In 1959, he gave up his position as chairman of the CPR to Liu Shaoqi and, though he remained chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), real energy was slipping away from him.

In 1966, Mao struck back. Suspending all secondary schools and universities, he summoned millions of students to Beijing. In a series of six giant rallies staged between August and November he told them that the revolution was in danger and that it was their duty to save it. The campaign that followed was known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Brandishing copies from the Little Red Book of Collected Thoughts of Chairman Mao, groups of so-called Red Guards rampaged through cities and countryside insulting, torturing or killing anybody suspected of ‘counter-revolutionary’ activity.

No-one, not even leading politicians, was safe from the witch-hunt. Liu Shaoqi and the general secretary from the CCP, Deng Xiaoping, were both denounced as traitors and banished to remote provinces. Deng would later resume his political career and go on to turn out to be Chinese leader, but Liu died in exile. By 1968, the country was sliding towards civil war as gangs of Red Guards clashed with their opponents and with each other. Mao was forced to do an about-face. He utilized the army to restore order, and some 18 million Guards were packed off into the countryside to be re-educated’ at hard labour. The worst of the violence was over, but the political reverberations from the Cultural Revolution would rumble on for many years.

At the same time, the hostility in between China and also the Soviet Union was increasing. In 1969, the swapping of insults gave method to clashes near the Ussuri River on the Sino- Soviet border. Alarmed by the possibility of an all-out war with the USSR, Mao decided to enhance relations using the United States. The very first fruits of Mao’s new policy were Communist China’s entry into the United Nations. The Chinese People’s Republic was admitted in October 1971 in place of the Nationalist Chinese regime in Taiwan.

A few months later, US President Richard Nixon created his historic visit to China. When Mao died in 1976, a group of extremist politicians, known as the Gang of Four, tried to seize energy. They had been led by Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, and their aim was to carry about the strict policies of the Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But the moderates within the party had been too strong for them and they had been arrested and charged with several crimes. ‘1 was Chairman Mao’s dog,’ Jiang blurted out at her trial. ‘Whoever he told me to bite, I bit.’