Radical Target Setting and China’s Great Famine

This paper empirically examines the role of radical grain yield targets in triggering China’s Great Famine (1959-1961), one of the largest man-made catastrophes in human history. Starting from 1958, the Chinese central government assigned different grain yield targets to most counties based on their geographic locations, which seemed all unrealistically high. Using novel county-level data combined with a spatial regression discontinuity strategy, we find evidence that radical grain targets caused excessive procurement and subsequent famine. Our estimates show that a one-standard-deviation increase in grain yield targets led to an 18‰ higher death rates in 1960. This paper sheds new light on the consequences of target-setting in an authoritarian regime without considering local contexts.