It has been estimated that as many as 18 million people were killed in China as a result of policies followed in pursuit of the Cultural Revolution between 1965 and 1976. Many of these had been deliberately killed. Since the 1950s, 80 millions had died there, their deaths being unnecessarily accelerated by Chinese policies, 40 million of them from hunger. In the years of the Great Leap Forward, there had been 40 million deaths, of whom 2 to 3 million had been executed. In 1957, up to 1 million people had been executed.