A closer look
When the Banqiao Dam catastrophically failed in 1975, washing away entire Chinese towns and killing tens of thousands, the sheer horror of the event was compounded by communist bureaucracy. Local officials were so completely paralyzed by the fear of failing to meet Mao's strict agricultural quotas that they kept filing fake grain production reports. They were essentially managing the accounting for crops that were currently floating at the bottom of a newly formed inland sea. The rigid demands of a centrally planned economy created a situation where lying on the ledger was deemed vastly safer than admitting an apocalyptic infrastructure failure had occurred.
