Bumper harvest after bumper harvest, leap forward after leap forward!

This Chinese agricultural propaganda poster from the Great Leap Forward era depicts peasants joyfully carrying abundant grain sheaves, presenting a vision of agrarian prosperity that stood in devastating contrast to the reality of mass famine killing tens of millions. Created between 1958 and 1962 when Mao's disastrous collectivization policies destroyed traditional farming practices, such posters displayed healthy produce, strong workers, and mountains of grain while actual harvests collapsed due to forced communalization, unrealistic production quotas, and the diversion of agricultural labor to backyard steel furnaces. The slogan "Bumper harvest after bumper harvest, leap forward after leap forward!" typified the delusional rhetoric that accompanied one of history's deadliest man-made catastrophes.

The poster's visual vocabulary—brilliantly green fields, radiant skies, smiling peasants expressing universal happiness—constructed a fantasy landscape bearing no relationship to the horror unfolding in China's countryside. This disconnect between propaganda and reality reveals how totalitarian regimes weaponize imagery not merely to persuade but to gaslight entire populations, creating parallel realities where citizens must publicly affirm obvious lies to avoid persecution. The emphasis on communalism and collective achievement reinforced Maoist ideology even as that ideology produced famine through its assault on individual farming expertise and market mechanisms. These posters served to build false national pride while millions starved, demonstrating propaganda's capacity not just to deceive but to demand complicity in deception, as citizens who acknowledged the famine's reality risked denunciation for counter-revolutionary defeatism.