One of the most common misconceptions people have about Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in China

There is a story that Mao Zedong's single remark, "That bird is a bad bird" during the Four Pests Campaign, caused a famine that led to 40 million deaths.
However, this is an exaggeration.
In reality, research shows that the crop yield reduction caused by the Four Pests Campaign was only about 7%,
and only about 15% of those 40 million deaths were actually due to the Four Pests Campaign.
Of course, this is still a massive amount of damage, but it is not true that 40 million people died because of that alone.
Then why did those 40 million people actually die?
Because unrealistic harvest quotas were assigned, and officials reported inflated harvest numbers to please Mao,
the state proceeded to collect grain based on those inflated figures.
In other words, due to the false reporting of production, the state took away almost all the existing harvest,
and the core of the massive damage was the resulting man-made famine.
This is a phenomenon similar to the Holodomor, where the Soviet Union seized all Ukrainian grain, causing a man-made famine and genocide.
I am writing this because quite a few people are unaware of this.
Since the Four Pests Campaign is easy to satirize like a fable with the phrase "That bird is a bad bird,"
people mistakenly believe that was the essence of the event.
But the true historical fact is that the government collected excessive amounts of rice, causing the people to starve to death artificially.
Furthermore, while the people were dying, the collected rice was being exported.
It is one of the greatest blunders in the history of communist states.