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When Ren Moxun took up management of Duyun Normal College for Nationalities in 1958, Mao had just launched an ambitious national campaign dubbed the Great Leap Forward. The previous autumn, the Soviet Union had launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, a technological feat that stunned the world. The Soviet Union's leader, Nikita Khrushchev, set a goal of surpassing the US in industrial output in fifteen years. Mao was inspired to follow suit, declaring that China would catch up with the United Kingdom in fifteen years.

To meet such an astronomical goal, all of China would have to suspend business as usual for an emergency industrialization push. Duyun Normal College for Nationalities was no exception. Ren Moxun was ordered to halve the four-year curriculum to make time for steelmaking. His staff and students would work nights making steel while continuing their daytime classes, a grueling schedule. The exhausted students could only catch up on sleep during the day, and their coursework suffered.

Some steel was produced in the nationwide drive, but a lot of the amateur efforts came to naught. As farmers neglected the fields and melted farming tools to try to meet steel quotas, the crops failed. By 1959, starvation was widespread across Guizhou Province and the nation. In some Guizhou towns, grain rations were reduced to several tablespoons per person per day. Ren Moxun pleaded with local authorities to increase the students' rations, arguing that they needed more food to complete their workloads. They stretched their rations by growing radishes in the schoolyard and gathering acorns to grind into meal. The dean had Communist Party members among the staff—seen as the most morally upstanding employees—take turns guarding the pantry from theft.

Outside the schoolyard, the situation was even more dire. Local authorities across Guizhou were receiving reports of a swelling sickness. Farmers' abdomens were ballooning with fluid until it killed them. Investigations determined that the cause was starvation. By one historian's estimate, 10 percent of Guizhou's population died from the famine, one of the highest death rates in the country. The famine coincided with local unrest: At one point, officials instructed Ren Moxun and his students to disperse a crowd of angry ethnic minority villagers, which they did with reluctance. It is not clear what the villagers were protesting.

Ren Moxun's own family was struggling to put enough food on the table for their seven children. The family foraged wild roots, tasting them gingerly, unsure if they were edible. They ate wild castor beans, which gave them diarrhea. Ren Zhengfei had been an excellent student in middle school, but now he found it hard to concentrate. In his sophomore year of high school, he had to retake the final exams.

As Ren prepared for the grueling college entrance exam, the gaokao, his mother encouraged him by slipping him an extra corn cake now and then to ease his hunger pangs.

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In 1963, Ren Zhengfei was accepted to the Chongqing Institute of Architecture and Engineering (later merged into Chongqing University). This was not an elite school like Tsinghua or Peking University in the capital. But for a small-town student who had just survived a famine, it was good enough indeed. Chongqing was a major inland city in Sichuan Province, which was known for its mouth-numbingly spicy cuisine and its surrounding bamboo forests, where giant pandas roamed. As a temporary wartime capital for the Nationalists in the early 1940s, it had munitions factories, heavy industry, and engineering schools.

The Great Leap Forward and the famine had ended, but Ren's college experience was still not a normal one. Mao thought young people were spending too much time with their noses in books. They should be learning by building things with their hands, with the peasantry as their tutors. In early 1964, Mao ordered universities to thin out curriculums, making room for students to learn through practical work. The professors at the Chongqing Institute of Architecture and Engineering were obliged to turn lectures into reading handouts and allow students to take open-book tests. Teams of students were sent out for stints on construction sites. Mao also ordered universities to participate in nationwide defense preparations, with students run through militia drills.

On the morning of May 14, 1966, students awoke to find all classes suspended for three days. Mao announced that class enemies had infiltrated the Communist Party and had to be rooted out. The Cultural Revolution had begun. At Ren's university, students and teachers were told to write "big-character posters," handwritten signs denouncing individuals as counterrevolutionaries. Before long, some four thousand posters papered the campus. By the summer, the professors were in terror as growing numbers of them were denounced. More and more of Ren's classmates wore the red armbands of the Red Guards, Mao's youth paramilitary organization, which was spearheading the hunt for counterrevolutionaries.

As was happening elsewhere across the nation, Red Guards at Ren's university overthrew the administration, forcing the professors to turn over the keys and official seal. They overthrew the Chongqing government as well. Teachers and students fled. Management of the college remained in chaos for the next two years. In February 1967, some fellow students at Ren's university kidnapped Luo Guangbin, a local writer. The Red Guards locked Luo up inside a room in the physics building on campus, denouncing him as a traitor who wrote reactionary novels, until he leaped from a window to his death.