What were the consequences of Mao's Great Leap Forward?
A Giant Leap Backwards. The Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) resulted in one of the largest famines in human history. Death estimates range from 15 to 55 million. The entire exercise in economic and social restructuring was an unmitigated disaster.
The only positive was that Mao was eventually forced (at least temporally) to allow Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to proceed cautiously in the future with any future changes. However this did not last long.
Ever the ideologue though, Mao could still not come to terms with his policy failure He placed the blame on the Party’s rightists thus precipitating another round of death in what was to become known as the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
In terms of absolute numbers of death it had been argued that Mao topped both Stalin and Hitler.
Having said this I am under no illusion that the myriad of CCP bots here on Quora will try and spin this in a positive light or gaslight the issue altogether.
For number of death re: Great Leap Forward Famine check out.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/ https://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/pyared/papers/famines.pdf
Was a war between the Soviet Union and Germany inevitable?
Yes. Hitler’s focus on acquiring Lebensraum in the East meant that war between these powers was likely to happen sometime in the near future. The Soviets knew this as well but were betting that it would occur at a later date than it did (June 22nd 1941). Some historians (check out the Viktor Surov thesis) have argued that the Soviets would have attacked Germany first had the time been right but this is not a well supported mainstream view. Having said that, one could say that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 1938) was in many ways more of a delaying strategy that benefited both parties than anything else.
Why has Japan produced so many Nobel Prize winning scientists?
They modernized earlier then the rest of Asia (and for that matter a great deal of Europe) and have a general population that has one of the highest gfactor values (general intelligence) for all nations. This means that on a global level they have a large number of people as a proportion of the country above the 120 IQ level (SD=15). This correlates well with innovation, analytic thought and Nobel Prize wins in the sciences.
Why were the French people so poor before the Revolution?
They had a top down class system that restricted upward mobility while foistering on the the 3rd Estate a ridiculously high tax burden. If want block all paths to life improvement both socially and economically, poverty is the natural outcome. The Ancien Regime did both. It was the antithesis of genuine liberalism.
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