“In a vast, continental country with a huge and poor population, Mao sought economic growth through mass mobilization, trying to substitute ideological fervor for material rewards. He froze the people’s standard of living at subsistence levels in order to build a massive, wasteful industrial structure. In doing so, he ignored realities that contradicted his vision. A farmer’s son from rural Hunan, he allowed himself to be deluded by vast Potemkin fields at the start of the Great Leap Forward. As Dr. Li says, why should Mao have doubted that the communist paradise had arrived when he himself was living in it? He thought there was more to learn about leadership from the pages of Chinese history than from textbooks of modern engineering. While people starved, he imagined that they had more than they could eat.”

“With the growing scarcity of goods, I became more and more skeptical of the government's promise of higher standards of living and the advances that were being accomplished under the Great Leap Forward. I could only judge the country's progress by my daily experience on food queues. And it seemed that Tientsin had less and less instead of more and more.”