Ponder this ugly line-graph, but not just before sleeping

That notch at the 48-year-olds is the Great Leap Forward. It seems proportionally rather more severe than the notch for Russians aged 50-54 in 1995:



I saw the graph in the article here discussing the shape of the Chinese workforce. I don't know how much of it is that people aim not to have children in famine years - though contraception wasn't particularly encouraged in Mao's China; the one-child policy is 1979 under Deng and you will see the wider notch at age thirty; I can't find a decent explanation of what happened in 1996 - how much of it that starved women can't get or stay pregnant, and how much that babies don't survive famine years, but it seems to be a notch containing twelve million dead babies.