That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to effective central authority.

Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals?

If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look at what they're doing today.

And you don’t think short term profit chasing has a death count?

OP's point exactly: the Great Leap Forward is the classic example of society murdering people to make the line go up every quarter, no matter the cost or the truth.

Great leaders use human resources as resources, that's historically why they're great, acquire territory, build state capacity, both at expenditure of regenerating resources - lives. A few 5 year plans that traded a few million lives to save more millions later. And by million we mean low single digit percent, i.e. historic rounding error that isn't remarkable nor worth the fixation except by muh liberal value types.

There's a reason there was persistent Chinese famines before GLF, and none after, because early industrial policies sorted out land resource management via massive rural mobilization/infra/industrial efforts, i.e. why PRC industrialization % and lifespan was vastly higher than developing peers in 70s... that's all because GLF broadly worked, adding about cumulative 200 milliion lives in terms of extended lifespan and likely ~100m+ in terms of averted famine deaths. Most historically competent Chinese leadership is return to farseeing utilitarianism, willing to trade lives for progress, which always sucks for the people during time of upheaval, but ultimately net good.

Deaths in the Great Leap Forward were heavily concentrated as compared to the Industrial Revolution but the death tolls from IR-related famines weren't really all that far off. Industrialization was messy everywhere.

The Irish Potato Famine alone killed 15% of Ireland vs the GLF killing 5% of China.

That's not a reason not to plan 5 years in advance... is it? Any more than the Potato Famine is a reason we should't have capitalism.

I can't say that I've ever heard the argument that a plan led to a famine therefore we should never make plans, when we have great counterexamples that not planning also led to famine. Feels like learning the wrong lesson here.

[edit] I also think it's worth pointing out that America's response to the Dust Bowl was the Farm Bill, which it could be argued is one of the largest-scale examples of central planning in history. It continues to this day, and is part of the reason Americans pay less as a share of their spending on food than any other country on earth.

People say everyone remembers the hits, nobody remembers the misses - but that is the opposite of true for government. Everyone remembers the misses, nobody thinks twice about the hits.

History is littered with corpses. For those willing to see them.