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Summary
Summary
The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great Famine
An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural disaster."
As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.
Tombstone is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, Tombstone is written both as a memorial to the lives lost--an enduring tombstone in memory of the dead--and in hopeful anticipation of the final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in The New York Review of Books , called the Chinese edition of Tombstone "groundbreaking . . . One of the most important books to come out of China in recent years."
Author Notes
Yang Jisheng was born in 1940, joined the Communist Party in 1964, and worked for the Xinhua News Agency from January 1968 until his retirement in 2001. He is now a deputy editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu (Chronicles of History), an official journal that regularly skirts censorship with articles on controversial political topics. A leading liberal voice, he published the Chinese version of Tombstone in Hong Kong in May 2008. Eight editions have been issued since then.Yang Jisheng lives in Beijing with his wife and two children.
Translator Bio:
Stacy Mosher learned Chinese in Hong Kong, where she lived for nearly 18 years. A long-time journalist, Mosher currently works as an editor and translator in Brooklyn.
Guo Jian is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Originally trained in Chinese language and literature, Guo was on the Chinese faculty of Beijing Normal University until he came to the United States to study for his PhD in English in the mid-1980's.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
One of the 20th century's worst catastrophes is a monument to Maoist tyranny and mismanagement, argues this hard-hitting study of China's Great Famine. Chinese journalist Yang, whose father died in the famine, compiles grim statistics-he estimates that 36 million people perished-and heartrending scenes of mass starvation and familial cannibalism. Even more shocking is his account of China's Great Leap Forward economic campaign, which caused the famine by pulling peasants from fields to work on ill-conceived industrial projects, melting down farming tools in backyard steel mills, and crippling agricultural productivity with collectivization schemes. Yang meticulously analyzes the delusional Communist ideology that nurtured the calamity: terrified of bearing bad news, party officials offered fantastic tales of bumper harvests to their superiors, who then exacerbated the hunger by hiking grain requisition quotas and exporting food while Mao's sycophantic personality cult prevented moderate leaders from challenging his disastrous economic experiments. This condensed English version of Yang's two-volume Chinese original suffers from disorganization; the outlines of the famine emerge only fitfully from his fragmented and repetitive accounts of its progress in individual provinces. Still, it's a harrowing read, illuminating a historic watershed that's too little known in the West. Map. Agent: Peter Bernstein. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Several famines were directly caused by communism's doctrinaire expropriation of private agriculture, but the worst example (pending future revelations from North Korea) ensued from Mao's Great Leap Forward. This account by a Chinese journalist includes an estimate of the death toll, and though it does not not comprehensively cover the tragedy, it nevertheless illustrates the collectivization process in three Chinese provinces. Yang, whose father was one of perhaps 36 million victims of starvation, provides a mass of statistical information about the communes of Henan, Gansu, and Anhui, where the peasants of those provinces were herded. The famine quickly kicked in, with corpses and cannibalism causing some local Communist cadres disquiet while goading more fanatical officials to intensify collectivization. Yang then links the local turmoil with the political jockeying it provoked at the top. The leadership debate resulted, according to Yang, in Mao's 1959 crushing of right-deviationists, ensuring the famine continued for several years. Apparently banned in China, this combination of demographic data and the revelation of once opaque politics elucidates one of the most sinister episodes of the Maoist era.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN the summer of 1962, China's president, Liu Shaoqi, warned Mao Zedong that "history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!" Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao's, where almost a million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or had killed and eaten their comrades. In "Tombstone," an eye-opening study of the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others failed to be born, which means that "China's total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million." There are good earlier studies of the famine and one excellent recent one, "Mao's Great Famine" by Frank Dikötter, but Yang's is significant because he lives in China and is boldly unsparing. Mao's rule, he writes, "became a secular theocracy. . . . Divergence from Mao's views was heresy. . . . Dread and falsehood were thus both the result and the lifeblood of totalitarianism." This political system, he argues, "caused the degeneration of the national character of the Chinese people." Yang, who was born in 1940, is a well-known veteran journalist and a Communist Party member. Before I quote the following sentence, remember that a huge portrait of Chairman Mao still hangs over the main gate into Beijing's Forbidden City and can be seen from every corner of Tiananmen Square, where his embalmed body lies in an elaborate mausoleum. Despite this continued public veneration, Yang looks squarely at the real chairman: "In power, Mao became immersed in China's traditional monarchal culture and Lenin and Stalin's 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' . . . When Mao was provided with a list of slogans for his approval, he personally added one: 'Long Live Chairman Mao.'" Two years ago, in an interview with the journalist Ian Johnson, Yang remarked that he views the famine "as part of the totalitarian system that China had at the time. The chief culprit was Mao." From the early 1990s, Yang writes, he began combing normally closed official archives containing confidential reports of the ravages of the famine, and reading accounts of the official killing of protesters. He found references to cannibalism and interviewed men and women who survived by eating human flesh. Chinese statistics are always overwhelming, so Yang helps us to conceptualize what 36 million deaths actually means. It is, he writes, "450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki" and "greater than the number of people killed in World War I." It also, he insists, "outstripped the ravages of World War II." While 40 to 50 million died in that war, it stretched over seven or eight years, while most deaths in the great Chinese famine, he notes, were "concentrated in a six-month period." The famine occurred neither during a war nor in a period of natural calamity. When mentioned in China, which is rarely, bad weather or Russian treachery are usually blamed for this disaster, and both are knowledgeably dismissed by Yang. The most staggering and detailed chapter in Yang's narrative relates what happened in Xinyang Prefecture, in Henan Province. A lush region, it was "the economic engine of the province," with a population in 1958 of 8.5 million. Mao's policies had driven the peasants from their individual small holdings; working communally, they were now forced to yield almost everything to the state, either to feed the cities or - crazily - to increase exports. The peasants were allotted enough grain for just a few months. In Xinyang alone, Yang calculates, over a million people died. MAO had pronounced that the family, in the new order of collective farming and eating, was no longer necessary. Liu Shaoqi, reliably sycophantic, agreed: "The family is a historically produced phenomenon and will be eliminated." Grain production plummeted, the communal kitchens collapsed. As yields dived, Zhou Enlai and other leaders, "the falcons and hounds of evil," as Yang describes them, assured Mao that agricultural production had in fact soared. Mao himself proclaimed that under the new dispensation yields could be exponentially higher. "Tell the peasants to resume eating chaff and herbs for half the year," he said, "and after some hardship for one or two or three years things will turn around." A journalist reporting on Xinyang at the time saw the desperation of ordinary people. Years later, he told Yang that he had witnessed a Party secretary - during the famine, cadres were well fed - treating his guests to a local delicacy. But he knew what happened to people who recorded the truth, so he said nothing: "How could I dare to write an internal reference report?" Indeed. Liu Shaoqi confronted Mao, who remembered all slights, and during the Cultural Revolution he was accused of being a traitor and an enemy agent. Expelled from the Party, he died alone, uncared for, anonymous. Of course, "Tombstone" has been banned in China, but in 2008 it was published in Hong Kong in two mighty volumes. Pirated texts and Internet summaries soon slipped over the border. This English version, although substantial, is roughly half the size of the original. Its eloquent translators, Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian, say their aim, like the author's, is to "present the tragedy in all its horror" and to render Yang's searching analysis in a manner that is both accessible to general readers and informative for specialists. There is much in this readable "Tombstone" I needed to know. Yang writes that one reason for the book's title is to establish a memorial for the uncle who raised him like a son and starved to death in 1959. At the time a devout believer in the Party and ignorant of the extent of what was going on in the country at large, Yang felt that everything, no matter how difficult, was part of China's battle for a new socialist order. Discovering official secrets during his work as a young journalist, he began to lose his faith. His real "awakening," however, came after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre: "The blood of those young students cleansed my brain of all the lies I had accepted over the previous decades." This is brave talk. Words and phrases associated with "Tiananmen" remain blocked on China's Internet. Nowadays, Yang asserts, "rulers and ordinary citizens alike know in their hearts that the totalitarian system has reached its end." He hopes "Tombstone" will help banish the "historical amnesia imposed by those in power" and spur his countrymen to "renounce man-made calamity, darkness and evil." While guardedly hopeful about the rise of democracy, Yang is ultimately a realist. Despite China's economic and social transformation, this courageous man concludes, "the political system remains unchanged." "Tombstone" doesn't directly challenge China's current regime, nor is its author part of an organized movement. And so, unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Yang Jisheng is not serving a long prison sentence. But he has driven a stake through the hearts of Mao Zedong and the party he helped found. A rice field in what is now Guangdong Province, 1958. Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian specializing in China.
Choice Review
Tombstone is a detailed account of China's Great Famine and the evolution of this former Xinhua journalist's understanding of the catastrophe that took his father's life and those of millions of others. Yang's work is based on research in the extensive archives of public security bureaus, party committees, government ministries, official documents, speeches and memos, and personal interviews. He argues that the famine was caused by China's policies, which resulted in hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants and workers losing numerous entitlements to food, and their having to resort to a wide range of illegal coping strategies attempting to obtain food. A reduction in available food stocks was caused by ideological disputes over how and how fast to transition to communism; power struggles; and inaccurate information flows. Millions of agricultural workers were diverted from food production to infrastructure and backyard steel projects; grain quotas and exports increased; food sales to communes decreased; and nonsensical orders to plow deeply, plant densely, and grow unsuitable crops proliferated. Total socialization of resources, food rations funneled through communal kitchens, and restrictions on alternative means to acquire food led to staggering starvation deaths (16 million-32 million) and birth shortfalls (27 million-32 million). Summing Up: Highly recommended. Students, lower-division undergraduate and up, faculty, and researchers. M. J. Frost Wittenberg University
Kirkus Review
The harrowing account of China's Great Famine. When he was a young boy in the countryside, writes Yang Jisheng, a classmate insisted that Chairman Mao "has been enthroned"--that is, following an old pattern in Chinese history, had overthrown the old emperor to become the new one. Mao Zedong wasn't exactly an emperor--he complained bitterly about being lied to, something the first emperor in China, Shi Huangdi, would have dealt with by mass beheading--but he had the requisite aloofness to stand aside while, by the author's account, millions of his compatriots starved to death in a four-year famine that was partly the fault of the weather, partly the fault of overpopulation, but mostly the fault of politics. "The basic reason why tens of millions of people in China starved to death was totalitarianism," writes the author. In a book that may eventually be thought of as a Chinese analog to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, Yang offers a numbing inventory of the myriad dead and the statistics surrounding their demise: "One of the hospital's so-called doctors was an accountant, and one of the two nursing attendants was an eleven-year-old orphan. The smell of the wards was so horrendous that the nursing attendants couldn't bear to enter them"; "The figures on grain yield and pig farming quoted in the Anhui Daily report on Mao's visit were preposterous. . . . Once the lies were reproduced in People's Daily, cadres all over China felt compelled to spew out similar falsehoods." And the deaths were not just of the living, writes the author, all 36 million of them, but also of the imagined unborn, another 32 million who would have entered the world had there been no famine. The toll is astounding, and this book is important for many reasons--difficult to stomach, but important all the same.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When American journalist Edgar Snow defied state department bans to tour China in 1959, Premier Zhou Enlai assured him that reports of famine deaths were CIA propaganda. After Mao Zedong died in 1976, official Chinese accounts still blamed bad weather and local problems for the famine, but plausible foreign estimates of famine deaths steadily climbed from millions to tens of millions, and foreign scholars put the blame squarely on Mao's totalitarian rule (most tellingly, Frank Dikotter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958-1962). Yang, who joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1964 as a reporter for the official Xinhua News Agency, clandestinely interviewed bitter local officials and survivors and collected frank internal government reports. This two-volume, massively detailed, and scathing account was published in Hong Kong in 2008 and soon ran through eight printings (many copies went straight to the mainland). This selective translation, rearranged and annotated for foreign audiences, is still monumental. VERDICT Yang's stories are gruesome and his explanations moralistic, but readers with a background in Chinese studies will find it essential and riveting.-Charles W. Hayford, Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Map | p. vii |
| Introduction | p. ix |
| Translators' Note | p. xiii |
| A Chronology of the Great Famine | p. xv |
| An Everlasting Tombstone | p. 3 |
| 1 The Epicenter of the Disaster | p. 23 |
| 2 The Three Red Banners: Source of the Famine | p. 87 |
| 3 Hard Times in Gansu | p. 112 |
| 4 The People's Commune: Foundation of the Totalitarian System | p. 156 |
| 5 The Communal Kitchens | p. 174 |
| 6 Hungry Ghosts in Heaven's Pantry | p. 197 |
| 7 The Ravages of the Five Winds | p. 248 |
| 8 Anxious in Anhui | p. 269 |
| 9 The Food Crisis | p. 320 |
| 10 Turnaround in Lushan | p. 350 |
| 11 China's Population Loss in the Great Leap Forward | p. 394 |
| 12 The Official Response to the Crisis | p. 431 |
| 13 Social Stability During the Great Famine | p. 465 |
| 14 The Systemic Causes of the Great Famine | p. 483 |
| 15 The Great Famine's Impact on Chinese Politics | p. 499 |
| Notes | p. 523 |
| Bibliography | p. 577 |
| Index | p. 611 |