4 ideas
In Xinyang prefecture, Henan, local officials reported impossible harvests during 1959–60 and then seized nearly all remaining grain to meet quotas based on those reports. Militia blocked starving peasants from fleeing, and cadres beat and tortured people accused of hiding food. Becker reconstructs from survivor interviews that roughly a million people died in this one prefecture, with widespread reports of cannibalism, while granaries stayed locked.
When officials who report low numbers are punished as 'rightists,' every level of a hierarchy inflates output figures, and the top then treats those fictions as real. The state set grain requisitions and even exports on the basis of phantom harvests, so procurement took food and seed grain that never existed in surplus.
At the 1959 Lushan Conference, Defense Minister Peng Dehuai privately warned Mao that the Great Leap Forward was failing, and Mao purged him. A new anti-rightist campaign followed that made any admission of hunger politically suicidal, so the policies were intensified rather than reversed. Look for the moment a system punishes the person who reports bad news, because that is when a correctable mistake becomes a self-reinforcing disaster.
Mao enforced agronomic methods taken from the Soviet pseudoscience of Lysenko, including extreme close planting and very deep ploughing. Their authority came from political doctrine rather than from field results, so questioning them counted as disloyalty. Peasants who knew the methods would destroy yields were forced to use them anyway, which cut real output while reported output soared.