Abstract：In their study of China's Great Leap Forward Famine, scholars in the West have focused their efforts on several key topics and established a set of arguments in the past thirty years. First, based upon various estimations made by demographers with the use of the data of China's censuses and fertility samplings, the Western scholarship has generally accepted that excessive deaths during the famine were about 27-30 million people. Second, through many years of debate over the main cause of the famine, social scientists have not only greatly advanced the study of the famine by the means of methodology, but also enabled the academic circle to realize that the famine resulted from multiple causes, including the decisionmaking mistakes at the political center, decline in agricultural production, excessive grain procurement, urban preference in food distribution, mandatory public canteens, etc. Third, scholars have investigated the discrepancies of excessive death rate across regions. While most agree that the political radicalism of a provincial leadership played an important part in influencing that provinces mortality level, others point out that some other factors such as agricultural and ecological conditions played a role of no less importance. Last, a few scholars have examined the famine at villages in an attempt to understand the micro mechanisms that often decided the life and death of the peasants; and they perceive that traditional survival strategies such as “chi qing” (“eating green,” or eating unripened crops) were significant to the survivorship of the peasants. The Western scholarship has looked into other issues of the famine, for example the responsibility for the famine, women's life during the famine, etc. Over the years the Western scholars have formed a creative dialog over the Great Leap famine and made important contributions to the understanding of the famine.
陈意新. 西方学术界的大跃进饥荒研究[J]. 江苏大学学报（社会科学版）, 2015, 17(1): 13-25.
Chen Yixin. The Study of China's Great Leap Forward Famine in the West. Journal of Jiangsu University（Social Science Editi, 2015, 17(1): 13-25.
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2015, Vol. 17 
