When the Chinese Communist Party assumed power, Mao Zedong declared that “not even one person shall die of hunger.” A little over a decade later, China was in the midst of the most devastating famine in modern history. Between 1957 and 1962 – the years commonly associated with the Great Leap Forward – some 30 million peasants died from starvation and exhaustion. Rather than examining why party leaders stumbled so badly in their attempts to modernize China, Eating Bitterness explores what the Great Leap Forward meant for ordinary people in rural and urban settings, from the provincial level to the grassroots. Drawing on newly available sources including archival documents, oral interviews, and ethnographic data, the contributors offer new perspectives on the foundations and consequences of the Great Leap Forward and famine. They investigate the operation of people’s communes, resource allocation, power and decision making at the local level, and rural resistance and acquiescence. This landmark volume lifts the curtain of officially propagated images of mass mobilization to expose the uneven and deeply contested nature of state-society relations in Maoist China and the role that history writing and memory have played in shaping narratives of the recent past.