A few extra things to contextualize it:

• it was extremely regionalized, with some communes seeing their production collapse and suffering famine as a result, while others did not.

• the specific models that failed in broader application originated in rural communes and were popularized because they seemed to be working (whether they actually were working or not is up in the air, because of the next point).

• there was considerable fraud from local officials overreporting both harvest yields and how much grain they were shipping, while the logistics system was so rudimentary and overwhelmed that there wasn't proper tracking to determine that the reason the system somewhere was, say, 100 tons of grain short was because specific communes were claiming to be sending twice as much grain as they really were - once it was in the system they weren't tracking were it came from or verifying that the numbers were correct.

• it should probably also be said that a driving reason that the CPC leadership wanted to popularize the hybrid agricultural/industrial commune model was because all of their centers of industry were urban and near the coast making them vulnerable to strikes by the US, so a lower density distributed model that moved their industry inland was extremely appealing. It was also perceived as a solution to the problem of urban/rural inequality. So when some of the overall autarkic communes were like "hey we're trying this new hybrid model and it looks like it's going good" the CPC jumped at it and held them up as a model for the other communes to follow.

Obviously the reforms didn't work out in practice, but they happened for clear reasons and the core problem comes back around to China just being critically short of industrial capital at the time and the central planning system being horribly overwhelmed to the point that it couldn't detect catastrophic shortfalls.

Sorghum and Steel goes into way more details about the conditions both prior to and during the Great Leap Forward, and although it does interject a lot of flowery performative denunciation of the CPC alongside the otherwise dry and impassionate academic writing it's still the most sympathetic and nuanced account I've ever seen. Ironically, despite the authors' stance it's probably the piece that most changed my view on China, and excerpts I shared with or summarized for anarchists I knew also softened their views on China - understanding the policies and material conditions makes it real and humanized in a way that the sea of propaganda we exist in actively tries to stop from happening.

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Until a history-knower can actually answer your questions, I'd just like to say that it being the last major Chinese famine isn't a positive spin, it's just a plain fact

KobaCumTribute laid out some good context. but its important to add that the withdrawal of Soviet aid was a major blow to China’s economy, as China’s industry was in its infancy and reliant on Soviet capital and expertise. China responded by decentralizing fiscal policy, and the inexperienced local governments all rushed to industrialize too quickly. Soviets began withdrawing in 1957, and by 1960 had completely withdrawn all investments and personnel. with loss of foreign capital and the costly kickstarting of industrialization, local gov expenditures skyrocketed as they struggled to maintain revenue

First of all that, some "anti-revisionists" (obviously not you) need to hear this, it DID happen and millions of people DID die, and it should be easy to admit that in a friendly socialist space.