You'd think if there were "massive fraud" that it would be easy to detect and provide evidence of.
6 states. Should be some evidence somewhere ...
I think that WaPo article is confusing communism and socialism.
Communism = state ownership of most of the economy.
Socialism has many gradations including the democratic socialism of Scandinavia.
And the more extreme strongman socialism of Venezuela.
What's interesting is that even though China is ruled by a communist party, they've largely ditched Marx for the market (Market-Leninist), but the government controls and directs much of the economy in concert with the privatized half. So it more resembles a fascist gov't.
Otherwise, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao got the simplistic idea that steel production was the best measure of a country's economic and military prowess. So the entire country was mobilized to increase steel production. Though much of it made with great effort in every village was inferior pig iron with limited uses.
Worse, farmers and households were often forced to melt down their frying pans and tools to boost steel production. This meshed with the collectivization in which individuals and households weren't supposed to have private ownership, but everything would be communal. Obviously this was ridiculously short-sighted, poorly planned, and the resulting steel was often crappy. It also didn't help that before the collectivization deadline, lots of peasants started slaughtering and eating their livestock, instead of donating it to the collective.
Bad ideas + huge mismanagement. Which does sound like Trump and CV-19.
I think some major reasons why the Great Leap Forward has often been buried is that
1) it was soon after followed by a decade long stretch of turmoil and upheaval and deaths known as the Cultural Revolution (1965-75). So the earlier shorter disaster was pushed aside by the more immediate and longer horrors. A US parallel might be how the Korean War was overshadowed by the longer uglier Vietnam War. In many ways the Cult Rev was a reaction by Mao and his cronies to hang on to power and ruthlessly stop any backlash resulting from the Great Leap Forward disaster.
2) China remained communist with Mao as its founding father and has effectively kept a lid on archival research and suppressed news of the GLF.
3) it was mostly a countryside disaster and death toll, which makes it harder to get info and interview people and document, allowing it to be kept hidden more effectively. Countryside starvation policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine are slowly unfolding disasters hidden from urban media centers, and are less dramatic than urban riots and such. The Cultural Revolution, with a large urban component, has been documented much better and presented as a warning to personality cults run wild.
Poll
5 (45.5%)