Eating BitternessWhen 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 Maos Great Leap Forward some 30 million peasants died of starvation and exhaustion. Rather than exploring why party leaders stumbled so badly in their attempts to modernize China,