During China’s great leap forward which also is similar in characteristic to what people call the holodomor, in order to support the newly large populations moving to cities, they had to completely rebuild their entire food supply chains in a very short period of time. This resulted in taking food from former substance farmers to the point of starvation in order to support the broader country. The collapse of a supply chain is never not massively destructive and always results in problems that take a very long time to recover from (it’s a big reason why countries bail out companies during a recession).

The Great Leap Forward was a program of attempting to add basic industrial production to already established rural communes based on the apparent successes of some communes at doing just that, for a wide variety of material reasons ranging from wanting to decentralize their industry and move it inland from the comparatively vulnerable coasts to wanting to build the productive capital needed to mechanize rural agriculture and logistics infrastructure. This caused a serious agricultural labor shortage in some regions (and most of China's less savory policies resulted from the need to maintain a strict balance between rural agriculture and urban industry in order to avoid famine) which resulted in massive shortfalls in production which were then misreported by local officials, resulting in the expropriation of unsustainable amounts of grain from famine struck regions until the central leadership discovered how horribly the logistics and feedback mechanisms had failed and moved to correct the problems and alleviate the famine.