China’s Great Leap Forward, a social engineering plan put forth by Mao Zedong in 1959, was the single most deadly event in human history, with an estimated 30 million lives lost

When Mao came to power in China, he had big plans to change his country. For all of it’s history, China was an agrarian nation, or farmers. Mao wanted to change this. He envisioned the poor farmers of China uniting to remake the country into a vast, modern industrial superpower, similar to the rise of the neighboring Soviets, whom Mao drew inspiration.

His program, called the great leap forward, involved taking millions of farmers off their fields into industrial collectives. Farmers where told to melt their ploughs and steel scrap into the tools of industry to make steel.

But obviously there is a problem, as a lifetime farmer doesn’t know anything about making steel. And when you take everyone off of farming and turn them into workers in a field they know nothing about, both farming and steel making fail.