<P> Frank Dikötter writes that beatings with sticks was the most common method used by local cadres and roughly half of all cadres regularly pummeled or caned people . Other cadres devised harsher means to humiliate and torture those who failed to keep up . As mass starvation set in, ever greater violence had to be inflicted in order to coerce malnourished people to labor in the fields . Victims were buried alive, thrown bound into ponds, stripped naked and forced to labor in the middle of winter, doused in boiling water, forced to ingest excrement and urine, and subjected to mutilation (hair ripped out, noses and ears lopped off). In Guangdong, some cadres injected salt water into their victims with needles normally reserved for cattle . Around 6 to 8% of those who died during the Great Leap Forward were tortured to death or summarily killed . </P> <P> Benjamin Valentino notes that "communist officials sometimes tortured and killed those accused of failing to meet their grain quota ." </P> <P> However, J.G. Mahoney, Professor of Liberal Studies and East Asian Studies at Grand Valley State University, has said that "there is too much diversity and dynamism in the country for one work to capture...rural China as if it were one place ." Mahoney describes an elderly man in rural Shanxi who recalls Mao fondly, saying "Before Mao we sometimes ate leaves, after liberation we did not ." Regardless, Mahoney points out that Da Fo villagers recall the Great Leap as a period of famine and death, and among those who survived in Da Fo were precisely those who could digest leaves . </P> <P> The initial impact of the Great Leap Forward was discussed at the Lushan Conference in July / August 1959 . Although many of the more moderate leaders had reservations about the new policy, the only senior leader to speak out openly was Marshal Peng Dehuai . Mao responded to Peng's criticism of the Great Leap by dismissing Peng from his post as Defence Minister, denouncing Peng (who came from a poor peasant family) and his supporters as "bourgeois," and launching a nationwide campaign against "rightist opportunism ." Peng was replaced by Lin Biao, who began a systematic purge of Peng's supporters from the military . </P>

Explain the great leap forward campaign of china initiated in 1958