Mao's drive to overtake industrial economies through mass mobilisation collectivised the countryside into people's communes and pushed backyard steel production and crash industrial projects. The resulting economic disruption and grain procurement helped cause a famine that killed tens of millions between 1959 and 1961. Urban populations had briefly swollen with recruited workers before millions were sent back to the land as the policy collapsed. Planned new industrial towns were begun and often left unfinished.
It exposed the limits of mobilisation-led urban-industrial growth and triggered an abrupt, forced de-urbanisation of recently arrived workers.
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