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Gale Johnson (1975):

For the entire twentieth century to the present, there have probably been between 12 million and 15 million famine deaths

As late as c. 1975, was the Great Leap Forward famine still not widely known?

When did it become widely known (at least among western historians/intellectuals)?

(Note: According to Our World in Data, the famines in 1900–49 alone killed 55M people, so Johnson's estimate above is wildly incorrect, even ignoring the Great Leap Forward. Nonetheless, his estimate does seem to suggest complete ignorance of the Great Leap Forward.)

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    The fact that China was a closed communist country that didn't (and doesn't) like bad publicity has something to do with it.
    – Jos
    Commented Jul 20 at 6:43
  • 3
    I don't know about "widely known", but it was mentioned in the Sep. 26, 1960 issue of Life, p. 39
    – njuffa
    Commented Jul 20 at 7:40
  • Google offers only miniscule snippets of contemporary publications, but it seems that the general fact that millions perished in the famine triggered by the Great Leap was known in the West by 1968. Solid estimates (how many millions?) may have come later, though.
    – njuffa
    Commented Jul 20 at 7:50
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    Known to politicians/historians/intellectuals and known to public*/*widely known are different things. The mass extermination of Jews was known to western authorities as early as 1942, but even today many people think that the concentration camps were first discovered when liberated by the American army in 1945.
    – Roger V.
    Commented Jul 20 at 9:00
  • 1
    Documenting preliminary research will improve both the probability of an answer and the quality of the answer(s) Did you check google ngram? any other sources?
    – MCW ♦
    Commented Jul 20 at 13:10

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