Welfare economist and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics Professor Amartya Sen argued in the early 1980s that the severity of the tragedy was increased by the suppression of information. He said that censorship contributes to famine and therefore concluded that it is more difficult for famines to occur in countries with a free press. Sen wrote, "what was lacking when the famine threatened China was a political system of adversarial journalism and opposition.[...] Not only was the world ignorant of the terrible state of affairs in China, even the population itself did not know about the extent of the national calamity....''.

The "Great Leap Forward" was a campaign undertaken by the Chinese Communists in this time to organize China's vast population and to meet its industrial and agricultural problems - they wanted to increase China's agricultural production while still maintaining high industrial growth. The Chinese people hoped that they would develop methods of industrialization which would emphasize manpower rather than machines. Small steel furnaces were built in villages which eliminated the necessity of new factories and peasants and city workers had to abandon their fields and factories in order to run these furnaces. The commune system brought all rural land and major farm equipment under collective ownership. Chairman Mao Zedong had hoped that this effort would help his nation and people out of poverty; but instead, the system failed and brought about a human catastrophe.