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In 1958 Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, the most ambitious attempt in history to leap straight from a backward agrarian society into full communism. Convinced that Marxist theory allowed China to skip the capitalist stage entirely, Mao ordered the country collectivised into giant “people’s communes”. Private property was abolished and the economy planned: steel production was to double in one year; grain output was to soar. Ideology demanded it: the masses, freed from “feudal” incentives, would achieve miracles through sheer collective will. But fraught by bad decisions and poor working conditions, lacking in incentives for hard work, and undermined by the assignment of rural workers to China’s nascent industry, the Great Leap Forward was a catastrophe. In 1959, crops failed, but Mao continued to move grains to the cities and maintained his agricultural export programme. The stubborn commitment to The Great Leap forward, upon which much of Mao's political power hinged, would all but destroy agricultural production in China for three years. When it was finally abandoned in 1962, as many as 45 million people had starved to death in what is the worst famine in human history. Entire villages were wiped out. Cannibalism was reported in some provinces. The Great Leap Forward was communism taken at its word: the total abolition of private property, the subordination of the individual to the collective, and the belief that political will can override economic reality. Mao’s ideology demanded the destruction of the old order. The corpses were simply the price of perfect equality.

BREAKING: Odds of a recession this year plummet from 40% to 22% — a one-month low.

One of the leaders of the protest, Christopher Duffy, was standing by as the official groups exited the meeting. He said the protesters have been “put at the kiddies table” by Govt. Asked what it will take to bring protest to an end, he said: “A serious reduction in our costs”