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墓碑：中國六十年代大饑荒紀實 #1-2
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962
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."
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."
656 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
421 people are currently reading
6211 people want to read
About the author
Yang Jisheng
13 books59 followersYang Jisheng (Chinese: 杨继绳, born November 1940) is a Chinese journalist and author. His work include Tombstone (墓碑), a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward, and The World Turned Upside Down (天地翻覆), a history of the Cultural Revolution. Yang joined the Communist Party in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until his retirement in 2001. His loyalty to the party was destroyed by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
Although Yang continued working for the Xinhua News Agency, he spent much of his time researching for Tombstone. As of 2008, he was the deputy editor of the journal China Through the Ages (炎黄春秋), 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. Yang is also listed as a Fellow of China Media Project, a department under Hong Kong University. He lives in Beijing with his wife and two children.
Although Yang continued working for the Xinhua News Agency, he spent much of his time researching for Tombstone. As of 2008, he was the deputy editor of the journal China Through the Ages (炎黄春秋), 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. Yang is also listed as a Fellow of China Media Project, a department under Hong Kong University. He lives in Beijing with his wife and two children.
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February 7, 2017
Edit: Nothing to do with the book, but everything to do with the subject, political famine, read this about North Korea and cannibalism. In 2013. Beyond wicked. http://bit.do/cannabalism
What to say about the most terrible book I've ever read? It's a five-star read without doubt but how can I say I enjoyed a book that documents the demise by starvation, by purely political starvation, of 36,000,000 people. It won't surprise you to know that this book is banned in China.
The book wasn't brief. It detailed each political step that led down to the hell where people died where they fell, where there wasn't anyone strong enough to bury them, where a train chuffing through miles of countryside would pass corpse after corpse after corpse. It detailed what the people ate when all their food had been taken from them to meet 'targets', how they ate bark, how they ate vermin, how they ate bugs and how some, a lot, even ate each other. And meanwhile those who could have distributed them food, stole it. Stole it ever on higher up the political chain right up to the obese Mao Zedong and his cohorts' snouts snuffling in their golden troughs.
What is the philosophy of Communism? Didn't Marx say, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." I've never thought that once a communist entity outgrows the stage where each person knows every other (as in a kibbutz) it remains communist, after that it becomes a left-wing dictatorship where the people at the top think they are entitled to live off the fruits those beneath them produce. And this attitude filters down right through the cadres until it reaches the bottom level and they aren't entitled to anything, they must hand over everything they produce. Shades of Animal Farm, a book also banned in China.
It started simply enough. It was the year after the beginning of the Great Leap Forward. A commune was asked what target they would set for their next harvest of grain. The representative replied and the official thinking this was a very high estimate, asked him again what his commune could produce. The representative thinking that what he had said wasn't high enough, named a higher figure. And it all started from that.
One girl, starving, killed her own four-year brother to eat him. She was jailed, but only because the police (well-fed - otherwise they wouldn't enforce the entrapment of villagers in their foodless villages and the arrest and punishment of those caught eating the food they had produced but should have handed over) thought she would get some food in prison if nowhere else.
Mao Zedong had a policy of, say seven fingers good and only three fingers bad, that's still four fingers going forward. Applicable for production maybe, but for an agricultural policy that was killing tens of millions of people?
This spoiler is a long extract from the Boston Globe's review of the book. It says it much better than I do.
I recently read Messages from an Unknown Chinese Mother about State-sponsored murder of baby girls. If a boy is born, the family got an extra portion of land and an extra ration of food, if a girl is born nada, nothing, and the ancestors would be displeased with a lowly girl too and the mother's status in the community as a woman without a son might be so bad that she would be forced to leave the village. So what do you do, a poor peasant with only one child allowed and no means of getting extra food? You murder it. And what does the State do about this murder? Nothing. It was expected.
China was wrong on agricultural policies and reaped famine as a reward, wrong on one-child families and reaped boys without hope of girlfriends forming violent and drunken gangs, kidnap of young women and worse, who is to pay the pensions of the increasingly aging population of this vast country?
China has an interesting culture, but I find very little admirable about it's political system and wonder what group of people the next Great Leap Forward will end up killing in vast numbers?
This review does turn into a bit of a diatribe, but I felt very strongly about this book.
What to say about the most terrible book I've ever read? It's a five-star read without doubt but how can I say I enjoyed a book that documents the demise by starvation, by purely political starvation, of 36,000,000 people. It won't surprise you to know that this book is banned in China.
The book wasn't brief. It detailed each political step that led down to the hell where people died where they fell, where there wasn't anyone strong enough to bury them, where a train chuffing through miles of countryside would pass corpse after corpse after corpse. It detailed what the people ate when all their food had been taken from them to meet 'targets', how they ate bark, how they ate vermin, how they ate bugs and how some, a lot, even ate each other. And meanwhile those who could have distributed them food, stole it. Stole it ever on higher up the political chain right up to the obese Mao Zedong and his cohorts' snouts snuffling in their golden troughs.
What is the philosophy of Communism? Didn't Marx say, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." I've never thought that once a communist entity outgrows the stage where each person knows every other (as in a kibbutz) it remains communist, after that it becomes a left-wing dictatorship where the people at the top think they are entitled to live off the fruits those beneath them produce. And this attitude filters down right through the cadres until it reaches the bottom level and they aren't entitled to anything, they must hand over everything they produce. Shades of Animal Farm, a book also banned in China.
It started simply enough. It was the year after the beginning of the Great Leap Forward. A commune was asked what target they would set for their next harvest of grain. The representative replied and the official thinking this was a very high estimate, asked him again what his commune could produce. The representative thinking that what he had said wasn't high enough, named a higher figure. And it all started from that.
One girl, starving, killed her own four-year brother to eat him. She was jailed, but only because the police (well-fed - otherwise they wouldn't enforce the entrapment of villagers in their foodless villages and the arrest and punishment of those caught eating the food they had produced but should have handed over) thought she would get some food in prison if nowhere else.
Mao Zedong had a policy of, say seven fingers good and only three fingers bad, that's still four fingers going forward. Applicable for production maybe, but for an agricultural policy that was killing tens of millions of people?
This spoiler is a long extract from the Boston Globe's review of the book. It says it much better than I do.
I recently read Messages from an Unknown Chinese Mother about State-sponsored murder of baby girls. If a boy is born, the family got an extra portion of land and an extra ration of food, if a girl is born nada, nothing, and the ancestors would be displeased with a lowly girl too and the mother's status in the community as a woman without a son might be so bad that she would be forced to leave the village. So what do you do, a poor peasant with only one child allowed and no means of getting extra food? You murder it. And what does the State do about this murder? Nothing. It was expected.
China was wrong on agricultural policies and reaped famine as a reward, wrong on one-child families and reaped boys without hope of girlfriends forming violent and drunken gangs, kidnap of young women and worse, who is to pay the pensions of the increasingly aging population of this vast country?
China has an interesting culture, but I find very little admirable about it's political system and wonder what group of people the next Great Leap Forward will end up killing in vast numbers?
This review does turn into a bit of a diatribe, but I felt very strongly about this book.
May 25, 2020
Beware Law Written in the Heart
The quantity of unintended human misery is near enough infinite. But the quantity of misery experienced by the Chinese nation intentionally through its own government's policies is of a higher cardinal order of infinity altogether. The capacity of the Chinese to endure what they have seems only matched by their capacity to forget it. It appears that nothing about China can be exaggerated. Its suffering, its resilience, its insanity, and its resistance to self-analysis, all defy measured description.
I had just entered American high school in 1961. Everyone was concerned about the Bay of Pigs invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the formation of OPEC, and the big Russian hydrogen bomb. No one who was known to me knew, much less cared, that somewhere around 45 million Chinese were dead or dying of starvation. China existed effectively in a universe beyond my event horizon, a situation almost unthinkable in a world of Twitter, Google Earth, and Feedly.
So to read Tombstone is shocking in two ways. First because it documents the famine planned by Mao Zedong for purely personal political reasons. Second because this was an event carried out in secret - not just kept from the rest of the world, but, more remarkably, kept from the Chinese themselves, despite the overwhelming physical evidence visible to everyone.
The research findings made by the author, whose father died of starvation in front of him, were even a surprise to him. He hadn't known, or at least couldn't accept the possibility, that his fellow countrymen of his own government, a government dedicated to socialist principles of human welfare, could intentionally do what they so obviously did: sacrifice not just the interests but the lives of an entire population to maintain the position of one man. At least Stalin had the politesse to terrorise and exterminate mainly those who might resist. Mao was not in the least selective.
My questions approaching Tombstone, therefore, are I suppose naively anthropological. Are the phenomena it describes, and describes well in terms of experiences as well as policies, simply human? That is, could any nation fall into the chasm of destruction that was the old Communist China given its circumstances and the randomness of politics; or was there something in Chinese culture itself, a fatal flaw, that was exploited by the Communist leadership? If what has gone on is a risk to/of humanity in general, why is its reality still resisted by the Chinese? If there is something peculiarly Chinese, in terms of history or culture, that has created such horror, how can it possibly be avoided as the central constitutional issue in today's China?
The answers Yang gives, I think, are reasonably clear, however nuanced his presentation. Certainly the imperial tradition and Confucian values of respect for authority promoted a level of receptivity to Maoist direction. But it was his description of a pervasive, highly spiritual, and apparently irrepressible, Chinese idealism which, it seems to me, energised the propaganda machine and motivated the Party at grassroots levels. This inveterate, irrepressible idealism, paradoxically, stands out as the most significant factor in sustaining such a murderous regime.
This is an unexpected conclusion, but one which introduces some comprehensibility to events. It is not a flaw in Chinese culture, but a virtue very much appreciated in the West, that was the lever used to move an entire society. And it seems to be the same lever used in subsequent shifts - from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution and into a Socialism With Chinese Characteristics.
That the Chinese are a people exceptionally willing to sacrifice themselves, even unto death, is certainly not how the Chinese are perceived through most Western media. Recent books like Paul Midler's Poorly Made in China, Evan Osnos's Age of Ambition, or Leslie Chang's Factory Girls describe a society of grasping individualism that appears to want to emulate the consumerist and entirely materialist mores of the West. It is, according to these accounts and many others, a society in which deceit, fraud (legal and not) and the exploitation of foreigners as well as other Chinese is routine. Principled living, much less idealism, hardly features.
But Yang gives things away that he may not even be aware of, and that those who are not part of Chinese society may not perceive as central to Chinese character because they are so much what we in the West perceive ourselves to be. There is a certain fear about China but that fear originates in a similarity too close to the bone to admit. This similarity is buried beneath differences in language, history and politics. Yet Yang alludes to it throughout. I shall attempt to put this similarity succinctly, even if inadequately.
An abiding ideal in Western culture, stated by all its principal religions, traditions and ancient philosophies, is 'the law written in the heart', that is, the assimilation of spiritual values so completely that codification and enforcement of formal restrictions is unnecessary. Individuals in such a state act correctly because they are aware of both the criteria of correct action and the beneficial effects of following those criteria. As I have shown elsewhere (see GR review of Giorgio Agamben's The Highest Poverty), this is the goal not only of Western monasticism but its derivative, the most important conceptual export from Europe to Asia in modern times: the idea of the civil corporation.
This ideal is embedded in European literature. Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans (and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, whoever he may be), Jeremiah and Ezekiel in their announcements of a new form of covenant, the Greek Stoic philosophers with their concept of natural law, the Roman Cicero in his raising of this natural law above legal statutes, even the injunction of the Quran that says, "This is the Nature of God on which he has formed and moulded the Nature of man. The understanding of this Nature constitutes right religion.", all speak of this internalised ethical as well as religious framework.
What all these texts are describing is the ideal society which is hidden in the heart of all men. 'Revealed' is how it is put in religious terms; 'known instinctively and universally' are the terms preferred by philosophy. The specific content of this ideal is not nearly as important as its presumed existence as a common moral 'core' of humanity.
Such an ideal is not just shared with Chinese culture. It is arguable, given the otherwise inexplicable mass cultural adaptations in China during the last 70 years, that this ideal is the central spiritual impulse of the entire Chinese nation. The Chinese have achieved what the West has perennially sought but failed to achieve - a social system controlled not by law but by common sentiment.
The strangeness of China in Western eyes - its 'adaptable' legal system, its willingness to conform to the party line, its creation of an economic system which is neither capitalist nor Marxist, its capacity for living with paradox - may well be down to the inability of those eyes to see how fundamentally they have abandoned this ideal as too difficult to achieve. Impossible for us, therefore it can't exist.
But it does exist in what its citizens consider a far more advanced society. It also gives the lie to the presumption, Freudian as well as Christian, that monotheism is essential to such internalised morality (pace to the American sociologist Philip Rieff who formulated the hypothesis)..
Clearly I do the Chinese nation, Yang’s book, and particularly those sacrificed during The Great Leap Forward, an injustice in this identification of an apparently unbounded spiritual idealism as the motive force of Chinese culture. For this I can only offer an apology; but I also remain in a way unrepentant. China is too vast - culturally as well as geographically - to comprehend. Such as I can only make a guess as to its meaning in anticipation of more, immensely more, reading and thinking.
But if I am only even partly correct, China raises an issue about the foundations of Western culture. Despite our long-standing lip service to the ideal of ‘law written in the heart’, are we really prepared for its consequences? Law in the heart tends not to be subject to effective criticism or adaptation to circumstances. It cannot be discussed because it is the foundation for all discussion. Its very hiddeness makes it dangerous. It may not be law at all, merely prejudice - literally premature judgement.
Hidden, secret law can obviously cause immense pain and harm. To the degree we have already approached this ideal in our overwhelmingly corporate lives, we too in the West have induced similar pain and harm - with somewhat less 'success' than the Chinese, for the moment. We still treasure it even though we may believe it to be infeasible. Our smug non-chalance may be just the opening needed for Trumpian blathering to undermine Western society as completely as Mao's demagoguery.
Yang quite sensibly prefers to substitute a ’tombstone in the heart’ as an alternative ideal. I am inclined to agree. Perhaps we might be able to find such an alternative for our corporate ideal.
The quantity of unintended human misery is near enough infinite. But the quantity of misery experienced by the Chinese nation intentionally through its own government's policies is of a higher cardinal order of infinity altogether. The capacity of the Chinese to endure what they have seems only matched by their capacity to forget it. It appears that nothing about China can be exaggerated. Its suffering, its resilience, its insanity, and its resistance to self-analysis, all defy measured description.
I had just entered American high school in 1961. Everyone was concerned about the Bay of Pigs invasion, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the formation of OPEC, and the big Russian hydrogen bomb. No one who was known to me knew, much less cared, that somewhere around 45 million Chinese were dead or dying of starvation. China existed effectively in a universe beyond my event horizon, a situation almost unthinkable in a world of Twitter, Google Earth, and Feedly.
So to read Tombstone is shocking in two ways. First because it documents the famine planned by Mao Zedong for purely personal political reasons. Second because this was an event carried out in secret - not just kept from the rest of the world, but, more remarkably, kept from the Chinese themselves, despite the overwhelming physical evidence visible to everyone.
The research findings made by the author, whose father died of starvation in front of him, were even a surprise to him. He hadn't known, or at least couldn't accept the possibility, that his fellow countrymen of his own government, a government dedicated to socialist principles of human welfare, could intentionally do what they so obviously did: sacrifice not just the interests but the lives of an entire population to maintain the position of one man. At least Stalin had the politesse to terrorise and exterminate mainly those who might resist. Mao was not in the least selective.
My questions approaching Tombstone, therefore, are I suppose naively anthropological. Are the phenomena it describes, and describes well in terms of experiences as well as policies, simply human? That is, could any nation fall into the chasm of destruction that was the old Communist China given its circumstances and the randomness of politics; or was there something in Chinese culture itself, a fatal flaw, that was exploited by the Communist leadership? If what has gone on is a risk to/of humanity in general, why is its reality still resisted by the Chinese? If there is something peculiarly Chinese, in terms of history or culture, that has created such horror, how can it possibly be avoided as the central constitutional issue in today's China?
The answers Yang gives, I think, are reasonably clear, however nuanced his presentation. Certainly the imperial tradition and Confucian values of respect for authority promoted a level of receptivity to Maoist direction. But it was his description of a pervasive, highly spiritual, and apparently irrepressible, Chinese idealism which, it seems to me, energised the propaganda machine and motivated the Party at grassroots levels. This inveterate, irrepressible idealism, paradoxically, stands out as the most significant factor in sustaining such a murderous regime.
This is an unexpected conclusion, but one which introduces some comprehensibility to events. It is not a flaw in Chinese culture, but a virtue very much appreciated in the West, that was the lever used to move an entire society. And it seems to be the same lever used in subsequent shifts - from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution and into a Socialism With Chinese Characteristics.
That the Chinese are a people exceptionally willing to sacrifice themselves, even unto death, is certainly not how the Chinese are perceived through most Western media. Recent books like Paul Midler's Poorly Made in China, Evan Osnos's Age of Ambition, or Leslie Chang's Factory Girls describe a society of grasping individualism that appears to want to emulate the consumerist and entirely materialist mores of the West. It is, according to these accounts and many others, a society in which deceit, fraud (legal and not) and the exploitation of foreigners as well as other Chinese is routine. Principled living, much less idealism, hardly features.
But Yang gives things away that he may not even be aware of, and that those who are not part of Chinese society may not perceive as central to Chinese character because they are so much what we in the West perceive ourselves to be. There is a certain fear about China but that fear originates in a similarity too close to the bone to admit. This similarity is buried beneath differences in language, history and politics. Yet Yang alludes to it throughout. I shall attempt to put this similarity succinctly, even if inadequately.
An abiding ideal in Western culture, stated by all its principal religions, traditions and ancient philosophies, is 'the law written in the heart', that is, the assimilation of spiritual values so completely that codification and enforcement of formal restrictions is unnecessary. Individuals in such a state act correctly because they are aware of both the criteria of correct action and the beneficial effects of following those criteria. As I have shown elsewhere (see GR review of Giorgio Agamben's The Highest Poverty), this is the goal not only of Western monasticism but its derivative, the most important conceptual export from Europe to Asia in modern times: the idea of the civil corporation.
This ideal is embedded in European literature. Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans (and the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, whoever he may be), Jeremiah and Ezekiel in their announcements of a new form of covenant, the Greek Stoic philosophers with their concept of natural law, the Roman Cicero in his raising of this natural law above legal statutes, even the injunction of the Quran that says, "This is the Nature of God on which he has formed and moulded the Nature of man. The understanding of this Nature constitutes right religion.", all speak of this internalised ethical as well as religious framework.
What all these texts are describing is the ideal society which is hidden in the heart of all men. 'Revealed' is how it is put in religious terms; 'known instinctively and universally' are the terms preferred by philosophy. The specific content of this ideal is not nearly as important as its presumed existence as a common moral 'core' of humanity.
Such an ideal is not just shared with Chinese culture. It is arguable, given the otherwise inexplicable mass cultural adaptations in China during the last 70 years, that this ideal is the central spiritual impulse of the entire Chinese nation. The Chinese have achieved what the West has perennially sought but failed to achieve - a social system controlled not by law but by common sentiment.
The strangeness of China in Western eyes - its 'adaptable' legal system, its willingness to conform to the party line, its creation of an economic system which is neither capitalist nor Marxist, its capacity for living with paradox - may well be down to the inability of those eyes to see how fundamentally they have abandoned this ideal as too difficult to achieve. Impossible for us, therefore it can't exist.
But it does exist in what its citizens consider a far more advanced society. It also gives the lie to the presumption, Freudian as well as Christian, that monotheism is essential to such internalised morality (pace to the American sociologist Philip Rieff who formulated the hypothesis)..
Clearly I do the Chinese nation, Yang’s book, and particularly those sacrificed during The Great Leap Forward, an injustice in this identification of an apparently unbounded spiritual idealism as the motive force of Chinese culture. For this I can only offer an apology; but I also remain in a way unrepentant. China is too vast - culturally as well as geographically - to comprehend. Such as I can only make a guess as to its meaning in anticipation of more, immensely more, reading and thinking.
But if I am only even partly correct, China raises an issue about the foundations of Western culture. Despite our long-standing lip service to the ideal of ‘law written in the heart’, are we really prepared for its consequences? Law in the heart tends not to be subject to effective criticism or adaptation to circumstances. It cannot be discussed because it is the foundation for all discussion. Its very hiddeness makes it dangerous. It may not be law at all, merely prejudice - literally premature judgement.
Hidden, secret law can obviously cause immense pain and harm. To the degree we have already approached this ideal in our overwhelmingly corporate lives, we too in the West have induced similar pain and harm - with somewhat less 'success' than the Chinese, for the moment. We still treasure it even though we may believe it to be infeasible. Our smug non-chalance may be just the opening needed for Trumpian blathering to undermine Western society as completely as Mao's demagoguery.
Yang quite sensibly prefers to substitute a ’tombstone in the heart’ as an alternative ideal. I am inclined to agree. Perhaps we might be able to find such an alternative for our corporate ideal.
July 31, 2019
Author Yang Jisheng tells us he wrote this book as a memorial to his foster father, who starved to death during the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61, the largest famine in human history. Estimates of those who died range from the official Chinese government figure of 17 million to as many as 45-50 million. The author devotes a chapter of his book to assessing the various studies, and concludes that at least 36 million people died, more than the total number of deaths in the entirety of the First World War. This catastrophe did not come about because of war, or drought, or a crop disease. All of this immensity of suffering – all of it – was caused by the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and in particular by the single individual of Mao Zedong. Some of these policies were so insane that it’s difficult to comprehend how they could have been devised by human beings otherwise capable of rational thought. It’s a warning of what happens when people become so blinded by ideology that they cannot see evidence right in front of them.
It’s beyond my skill to summarise the book adequately – I have shared highlights to help in doing so. It all started with the CCP taking monopoly control of the country’s food supply. All food was the property of the state, who provided rations to the population. Rural areas were ordered to produce set amounts of food, a proportion of which was requisitioned for city dwellers. When Mao called for a “Great Leap Forward” in production, local party leaders competed with one another to promise impossibly high yields. When the actual yields were nowhere near what had been promised, officials accused the peasants of hoarding, and ransacked houses to steal every scrap of food. Meanwhile, Mao and his senior colleagues lived in a make-believe world of bountiful harvests and happy, well-fed peasants. Mao even worried about the country producing too much food, and considered ordering fields be left fallow to alleviate the problem. In reality the country’s fields and roadways were littered with the corpses of the starved, but anyone who spoke the truth was accused of being a “right deviationist” and was subjected to what was euphemistically called “struggle” – actually a process in which the victims were publicly flogged, punched, kicked, or subjected to humiliations such as having sewage dumped on them. Many people were literally beaten to death.
The author doesn’t think that Mao deliberately set out to starve the peasantry. It was more a case of his ideological fanaticism combined with his monstrous ego and an unwillingness to tolerate the slightest challenge to his authority.
Mao disliked the idea of the family. He thought that the natural acquisitiveness of the family unit was the basis of capitalism and inequality. His vision was of a society where everyone lived in barracks and would be woken at a set time to be allocated their work for the day. No wages would be paid but people would be given food and clothing in the form of rations and would eat at set times in communal dining facilities. Control would be total, with people told when to work, eat and sleep, what work to do, what food to eat, what clothes to wear, and where they could live. The author describes the communal kitchens as places of staggering inefficiency and waste, and a major contributory factor in the famine.
The book’s English translation is considerably abridged, apparently only about half the length of the Chinese language original. That said it stretches to 523 pages, not counting footnotes. It’s incredibly detailed and full of tables showing crop yields, population losses etc. Parts of it did feel a bit repetitive. Despite these quibbles the book deserves five stars because of its importance. Very few people in the West know about these events, and Yang Jisheng’s book, published in Hong Kong in 2008, remains banned in mainland China. A grim read, but a magnificent piece of work.
It’s beyond my skill to summarise the book adequately – I have shared highlights to help in doing so. It all started with the CCP taking monopoly control of the country’s food supply. All food was the property of the state, who provided rations to the population. Rural areas were ordered to produce set amounts of food, a proportion of which was requisitioned for city dwellers. When Mao called for a “Great Leap Forward” in production, local party leaders competed with one another to promise impossibly high yields. When the actual yields were nowhere near what had been promised, officials accused the peasants of hoarding, and ransacked houses to steal every scrap of food. Meanwhile, Mao and his senior colleagues lived in a make-believe world of bountiful harvests and happy, well-fed peasants. Mao even worried about the country producing too much food, and considered ordering fields be left fallow to alleviate the problem. In reality the country’s fields and roadways were littered with the corpses of the starved, but anyone who spoke the truth was accused of being a “right deviationist” and was subjected to what was euphemistically called “struggle” – actually a process in which the victims were publicly flogged, punched, kicked, or subjected to humiliations such as having sewage dumped on them. Many people were literally beaten to death.
The author doesn’t think that Mao deliberately set out to starve the peasantry. It was more a case of his ideological fanaticism combined with his monstrous ego and an unwillingness to tolerate the slightest challenge to his authority.
Mao disliked the idea of the family. He thought that the natural acquisitiveness of the family unit was the basis of capitalism and inequality. His vision was of a society where everyone lived in barracks and would be woken at a set time to be allocated their work for the day. No wages would be paid but people would be given food and clothing in the form of rations and would eat at set times in communal dining facilities. Control would be total, with people told when to work, eat and sleep, what work to do, what food to eat, what clothes to wear, and where they could live. The author describes the communal kitchens as places of staggering inefficiency and waste, and a major contributory factor in the famine.
The book’s English translation is considerably abridged, apparently only about half the length of the Chinese language original. That said it stretches to 523 pages, not counting footnotes. It’s incredibly detailed and full of tables showing crop yields, population losses etc. Parts of it did feel a bit repetitive. Despite these quibbles the book deserves five stars because of its importance. Very few people in the West know about these events, and Yang Jisheng’s book, published in Hong Kong in 2008, remains banned in mainland China. A grim read, but a magnificent piece of work.
April 12, 2017
Nutshell: a mix of five-star primary reportage & archival work with one-star reckless inferences & commentary.
Text is like Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago insofar as it is an indictment, proceeding from the position of internal critique, written by an author as yet subject to the jurisdiction of the accused state. It is therefore written at the writer’s dire risk, and should be regarded as proof of the author's integrity and boldness.
Unlike Solzhenitsyn, however, this is no "literary investigation," stylized, ironic, or otherwise non-journalistic. Both Yang and Solzhenitsyn rely heavily on an accumulation of anecdotes, backed with statistics. In itself, the accumulation of anecdotes, the parade of horribles, can't be overemphasized. The statistics drawn from internal archives make this point all the more persuasive. This isn't to say that the anecdotes aren't an attempt at naked manipulation; recitation of individual tragedies, amidst the deaths of millions of persons, is a sort of micro-theatre, part and parcel to the genre of anti-communist literature. That doesn't make it wrong, of course--just obvious in its antecedents. I would nevertheless not deny the writer the moral force of his particularized evidence--and that evidence exerts irresistible force: what else might be said of numerous cases of anonymous cannibalism, patricidal cannibalism, pedophagia, up to and including the eating of one’s own minor children?
This volume is also, on the one hand, unlike The Black Book of Communism, which is an external critique that masks the local political goals of French anti-communists. On the other hand, Yang partakes of some of the standard anti-communist sleights of mind, such as indicting "communism" grossly (technically a reference to an economics), while focusing at times on carceral injustices, trifling ideological mass movements, want of parliamentary procedure, monopolization of education, police state thuggery, and so on. My criticism does not exhaust this book, however, as 1) Yang is also indicting "totalitarianism" at times, which sweeps up the items mentioned, and 2) Yang does focus on the economics of the Great Leap Forward, which is something that does not get much attention in some standards of the anti-communist genre.
Translated text was much longer in its original publication; translation is heavily edited, containing only "four of the original 'provincial' chapters, the six 'central,' or 'policy,' chapters, and five (instead of eight) 'analysis' chapters" (xiv). Includes a chronology of major events, extensive notes, bibliography, index. There’s also a provincial map included, but this volume should likely be read with an atlas on hand, as the included map does not break out prefectures, counties, cities, towns--and the narrative is sufficiently detailed to involve very local micro-detail (a great virtue).
The translated provincial chapters detail Henan, Sichuan, Gansu, and Anhui. Three of these are the top three in terms of highest unnatural deaths from the famine and within the top four regarding highest unnatural mortality rate, whereas the fourth has the eighth highest death toll and is the fifth highest death rate (see handy chart at 395-96). The chapters are well selected, then, to maximize the propaganda effect for the English-speaking audience. By contrast, Shanxi province had the seventh highest death rate, but the lowest death toll (~60,000 human persons) during the famine.
Author presents numerous calculations for overall death and birth rates, and settles on "36 million unnatural deaths" and "shortfall of 40 million births" (430) for the years 1958-62. Though author's preferred toll is on the high end of the range of estimation, I feel no need to dispute his numbers.
Similarly, author here avoids the normal anti-communist cliche, as one finds in Richard Pipes, say, that all of this commie stuff was just a waste, with no accomplishments. Author, rather, is willing to admit certain accomplishments, such as the precipitous rising of capital construction, which pulled laborers from the fields (90) or a brief list of “necessary and successful“ irrigation canals (125). I don't endorse the make-big-omelet/break-million-eggs approach to totalitarian development projects, but will merely insist that the famine paid a price that needn't've thereby been paid later. We see how that might work in The Political Economy of Hunger, by Dreze & Sen, who compare post-war India & China, noting that the Chinese regime caused the deaths of over 30 million human persons during the Great Leap Forward, whereas India's parliamentary system did not suffer any such massive, concentrated loss. However, China's post-war policies added 10-15 more years than India's to life expectancy, a result of medical care, infrastructure development, and so on. Outside the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese lead in life expectancy meant that "every eight years or so more people in addition die in India--in comparison with Chinese mortality rates--than the total number that died in the gigantic Chinese famine."
We might also call attention to Sen's work in Poverty and Famines, which develops the definitional work at issue in discussing famine: "Starvation is a normal feature in many parts of the world, but this phenomenon of 'regular' starvation has to be distinguished from violent outbursts of famine" (39). Poverty "can reflect relative deprivation as to absolute dispossession," and can "exist, and be regarded as acute, even when no serious starvation exists" whereas "starvation does imply poverty" (id.). Famine in 1958-62 aside, Sen notes that the "elimination of starvation in socialist economies--for example China--seems to have taken place even without a dramatic rise in food availability per head, and indeed, typically the former has preceded the latter" (7).
Yang doesn’t mention "British refusal to ban rice exports from famine-affected Hunan" in 1906 or from Changsha in 1910 (Sen 161). This latter omission is particularly salient, as Yang argues that “With official priority placed on feeding the burgeoning urban population and importing machinery in exchange for grain exports, grain was all but snatched from peasant mouths” (19).
The Chinese state exported substantial grains in order to generate the currency necessary to purchase industrial equipment abroad. This is no mere incidental, but rather was intrinsic to the Great Leap Forward: industrializing as quickly as possible to catch the UK, the US, the USSR. Chapter 9 lays out the numbers in several succinct charts, regarding the amount of grains grown, procured, exported, and so on (320-49). It is no defense to suggest that someone else is guilty of one’s own crime--however, it suggests that sale of foods on the international market by the Maoists is the issue, rather than the property forms or the political despotism. We note that the same mechanism was in place during the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s: “at the beginning of the thirties, grain production decreased, bread was in short supply, and millions of peasants were starving,” and yet “Stalin insisted on exporting great quantities of grain” (Medvedev, Let History Judge, at 69). The common theme of the British exports, the Chinese exports, and the Soviet exports is that they are global market participation for profit without regard for the livelihood of the workers who produced the grain. The problem, then, is insufficient workers’ rights--that is, insufficient socialism.
The practice of imposing hardship on the working population in order to procure exportable crops reminds one rather of IMF austerity programs; Zhou boasted afterward that China “not only did not borrow one yuan in foreign debt, but we also repaid nearly all of our past foreign debt” and also contributed “aid to socialist and nationalist countries” (458). (Author cites this language as evidence that China’s foreign debt was not a proximate cause of the great famine. I’m inclined to agree that repayment of the debt was not the primary or even a major cause.) Export is maximized, services to internal population minimized, debts repaid. This is violation of the basic Marxist principle of providing for the producers; instead, the state expropriated the producers, the standard for capitalist economics: “intolerable is the fact that while China’s people starved, the government continued to export large quantities of grain” (Yang 450).
Even though author cites Sen otherwise for the proposition that "no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press" (16), the passages that I‘ve quoted above are not mentioned in this translation. Author continues with Sen: "China, although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine" (id.). Given Sen’s other work, I find this usage of Sen to be at best manipulative.
Top rate is the presentation of memoranda, speeches, and other official statements by Mao, Zhou, Liu, and so on, regarding policy, ideological struggles, and the famine. These details are fascinating.
It is nevertheless the synthesis of the anecdotes/archives with the political memoranda/speeches that reveals author's recklessness. For instance, it’s routine to quote some memoranda from the government, and then note, post hoc ergo propter hoc that many deaths followed thereafter. So, Wu Zhipu, Henan’s governor at the pertinent time, is called out on the carpet for finding “grievous rightist errors” in the population and setting impractical, unrealistic industrial and agricultural targets (see e.g. 72-73 et seq.), leading inexorably to three millions dead in Henan (83). This process of quoting dumb commietalk and then highlighting deaths is pedestrian in the genre. Now, lest I sound like a scumbag defense attorney, the plaintiff lawyer in me counter-argues that it is a case of res ipsa loquitur: given the state monopoly over procurement and distribution, as well as the carceral institutions that compelled work and dictated residence, what other cause is even possible, let alone plausible? There can be no serious objection, as far as I’m concerned, that state policy is a proximate cause of the great famine--but the attempt to isolate policy as the sole cause, or, further, to isolate remote-seeming commietalk as the cause, is woefully inadequate. Famine historically is a political occurrence, with policy roots.
Another type of reckless inference is a repeated insistence that “no one dared speak the truth” (119, 191, &c.)--because of repressive techniques of the carceral apparatus--regarding exaggerated grain yields, overinvestment in steel production, failures of capital projects, food shortages, death tolls. While it is certainly fair to state that repressive techniques caused a chilling effect among those who knew that problems existed, it is inconsistent, page by page even, to suggest that no one dared speak the truth. We are, in fact, treated to many discussions of central committee members, local cadres, provincial officials, non-party members, and so on requesting relief, making grievances, filing oppositional memoranda, even taking arms against the state. Liu himself authored a tract against “rash advance” in industry and agriculture, for which he endured censure and underwent self-criticism. Zhou spoke out of turn and was disciplined. So, when Communist ideas are said to be “etched into every soul” (495), it can hardly be taken seriously, if there exist “right deviationists,” “right opportunists,” “left adventurists,” “left opportunists,” bourgeois peasants, degenerate elements, feudal remnants, and so on. We have, that is, an extraordinarily good presentation by author of the multi-layered debates that occurred at all levels during the great famine--but then we get categorical inferences that bear little relation to the evidence presented in the text, and arise instead out of the febrile clichés of the anti-communist genre.
The reckless inferential chains never become dishonest--except for the refutation of the official thesis that weather caused a natural disaster, leading inexorably to famine (452). Author contends, first, that the state “blamed it all on Mother Nature” (id.). The very next paragraphs, however, quote Liu for the proposition that “natural disaster was not the chief cause” and that the famine was “three parts natural disaster and seven parts man-made disaster” (id.). Author, second, contends that “the three years of the famine” were “in no way exceptional” (453). Analysis of rainfall and temperature thereafter follows, with several useful charts (453-56). Author suggests that some years during the famine were flood years, but only moderately, not worse than other years with no famine, whereas some years in the famine were drought years, each less severe than other times with no famine. Also, “divergence in [temperature productivity] for the years 1958-61 is not the largest for the forty-year period” (456). How weasely is that? The problem with the analysis is that each year is examined in isolation from other years. So, 1960 had a moderate drought, “less serious than in 1955, 1963, 1966, 1971, 1978, 1986, and 1988” (453), whereas 1959 and 1961 had less flooding than 1954, 1973, and so on (id.). Ergo, no weather problems! The chart helps visualize the effect: 1956-57 are normal, then 1958 has moderate drought, 1959 moderate flood, 1960 moderate drought, 1961 moderate flood--1962 is back to normal range (454). Cursory review of the other years cited for drought or flood are bordered by normal years on at least one side. The great famine sits astride four straight years of abnormality, alternating drought and flood. The aggregate effect, however, is not considered in author’s analysis.
Davis, in Late Victorian Holocausts, has considered this aggregation: “the ‘strong’ El Nino of 1957-59, which also produced a famous famine and nearly a million refugees in the Brazilian sertao was the likely culprit responsible for the onset of drought in 1958-59” (251). Davis passes along that “for the first time in human memory, people could actually wade across the Yellow River” (id.). Further review of the literature produces the conclusion that “‘the weather was the main cause of the enormous grain-yield losses in 1960 and 1961,’ but that the communes could still have survived the crisis without mass mortality if Beijing had not stupidly reduced its own sown acreage in 1959 (to divert labor to public works and backyard steel-making) and criminally enforced confiscatory procurement quotas in 1959-60,” the latter a reference to the export of grains (id).
The ultimate political thesis here is that the cause of 76 million aggregate human losses was "a ruthless suppression of political dissent with a highly centralized planned economy to produce a system that Mao Zedong himself characterized as 'Marx plus Qin Shihuang,'" a "combination of Soviet-style autocracy and ancient Chinese despotism" (17). The system at fault, therefore, is a palimpsest of the very ancient bleeding into the most modern, much as Pipes himself has described regarding the Russian Empire, a "peculiar type of political authority, blending native and Mongol elements, which arose in Moscow once the Golden Horde began to lossen its grip" (Russia under the Old Regime at 57). At the other end of the spectrum, Medvedev considers, then rejects, the popular thesis that "to explain Stalinism we have to return to earlier and earlier epochs of Russian history, very likely to the Tartar yoke"(Medvedev at 359)--but also concurs that "for centuries the cult of the tsar, the ideology of absolutism, had been ingrained in Russia" (Id., at 364). Those "centuries," we find, are long, as "the Novgorod Chronicle began referring to the new ruler not only as Khan Batu of the Mongols, but also as Tsar Batu, a title that literally meant Caesar Batu, signifying a new united rule over the many warring princely families of Russia," Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (150). Mao's reference to Qin Shihuang summons a ghost greater than a millennium more ancient than the Mongols in Russia, in view of which I am genuinely staggered. Mao accordingly became "the most powerful emperor who had ever ruled China" (17).
One very interesting late chapter addresses the issue of why, when “the Great Famine of the 1960s was unprecedented in scale,” did it not "give rise to major social turmoil?” (465). We are thereafter treated to a roll call of uprisings that did occur, as well as an approved list of totalitarian social controls that prevented rebellion. Uprisings “were more likely in the ethnic minority regions” (id.). A number of the uprisings described occur in and around Yunnan, which borders Burma in part. Author doesn’t get into it, but we know from Blum’s Killing Hope US Military and CIA Interventions that many of Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists took unlawful refuge in Burma and, organized and supplied by the CIA, began making incursions into Yunnan in the 1950s (Blum, at 23-24). The nationalists raided across the border and developed opium production in the Golden Triangle (25). So, some real subversion, omitted by Yang.
Text devolves from there, erecting a “communist fundamentalism” conceit (492-93), later to become “Marxist fundamentalism” (520), leading into the hackneyed suggestion that Mao gave us Pol Pot (521). A lengthy quotation of Herr Hayek (486) late in the volume seals it.
Last, an early admission reveals that the famine during the Great Leap Forward is different in degree, but not in kind, from prior Chinese famines: "most severe famine previously recorded occurred in 1928-30 [...] broke all previous records, but still killed only 10 million people" (13). Also, in 1920 through 1936, crop failures took the lives of 18.36 million people" (id.). These are crass statements, and reveal that this volume is, in part but not in whole, a hit piece, a concept assassination. "Only" 10 million? “Crop failures”? Famine is always already a political event. The point, of course, is that there is an interest here in minimizing prior famines, suppressing other parades of horribles, in order to effect a hayekian policy preference. This last is damning, in my not-at-all humble opinion.
All that said, a most substantial book on a most important subject. Highest recommendation.
Text is like Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago insofar as it is an indictment, proceeding from the position of internal critique, written by an author as yet subject to the jurisdiction of the accused state. It is therefore written at the writer’s dire risk, and should be regarded as proof of the author's integrity and boldness.
Unlike Solzhenitsyn, however, this is no "literary investigation," stylized, ironic, or otherwise non-journalistic. Both Yang and Solzhenitsyn rely heavily on an accumulation of anecdotes, backed with statistics. In itself, the accumulation of anecdotes, the parade of horribles, can't be overemphasized. The statistics drawn from internal archives make this point all the more persuasive. This isn't to say that the anecdotes aren't an attempt at naked manipulation; recitation of individual tragedies, amidst the deaths of millions of persons, is a sort of micro-theatre, part and parcel to the genre of anti-communist literature. That doesn't make it wrong, of course--just obvious in its antecedents. I would nevertheless not deny the writer the moral force of his particularized evidence--and that evidence exerts irresistible force: what else might be said of numerous cases of anonymous cannibalism, patricidal cannibalism, pedophagia, up to and including the eating of one’s own minor children?
This volume is also, on the one hand, unlike The Black Book of Communism, which is an external critique that masks the local political goals of French anti-communists. On the other hand, Yang partakes of some of the standard anti-communist sleights of mind, such as indicting "communism" grossly (technically a reference to an economics), while focusing at times on carceral injustices, trifling ideological mass movements, want of parliamentary procedure, monopolization of education, police state thuggery, and so on. My criticism does not exhaust this book, however, as 1) Yang is also indicting "totalitarianism" at times, which sweeps up the items mentioned, and 2) Yang does focus on the economics of the Great Leap Forward, which is something that does not get much attention in some standards of the anti-communist genre.
Translated text was much longer in its original publication; translation is heavily edited, containing only "four of the original 'provincial' chapters, the six 'central,' or 'policy,' chapters, and five (instead of eight) 'analysis' chapters" (xiv). Includes a chronology of major events, extensive notes, bibliography, index. There’s also a provincial map included, but this volume should likely be read with an atlas on hand, as the included map does not break out prefectures, counties, cities, towns--and the narrative is sufficiently detailed to involve very local micro-detail (a great virtue).
The translated provincial chapters detail Henan, Sichuan, Gansu, and Anhui. Three of these are the top three in terms of highest unnatural deaths from the famine and within the top four regarding highest unnatural mortality rate, whereas the fourth has the eighth highest death toll and is the fifth highest death rate (see handy chart at 395-96). The chapters are well selected, then, to maximize the propaganda effect for the English-speaking audience. By contrast, Shanxi province had the seventh highest death rate, but the lowest death toll (~60,000 human persons) during the famine.
Author presents numerous calculations for overall death and birth rates, and settles on "36 million unnatural deaths" and "shortfall of 40 million births" (430) for the years 1958-62. Though author's preferred toll is on the high end of the range of estimation, I feel no need to dispute his numbers.
Similarly, author here avoids the normal anti-communist cliche, as one finds in Richard Pipes, say, that all of this commie stuff was just a waste, with no accomplishments. Author, rather, is willing to admit certain accomplishments, such as the precipitous rising of capital construction, which pulled laborers from the fields (90) or a brief list of “necessary and successful“ irrigation canals (125). I don't endorse the make-big-omelet/break-million-eggs approach to totalitarian development projects, but will merely insist that the famine paid a price that needn't've thereby been paid later. We see how that might work in The Political Economy of Hunger, by Dreze & Sen, who compare post-war India & China, noting that the Chinese regime caused the deaths of over 30 million human persons during the Great Leap Forward, whereas India's parliamentary system did not suffer any such massive, concentrated loss. However, China's post-war policies added 10-15 more years than India's to life expectancy, a result of medical care, infrastructure development, and so on. Outside the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese lead in life expectancy meant that "every eight years or so more people in addition die in India--in comparison with Chinese mortality rates--than the total number that died in the gigantic Chinese famine."
We might also call attention to Sen's work in Poverty and Famines, which develops the definitional work at issue in discussing famine: "Starvation is a normal feature in many parts of the world, but this phenomenon of 'regular' starvation has to be distinguished from violent outbursts of famine" (39). Poverty "can reflect relative deprivation as to absolute dispossession," and can "exist, and be regarded as acute, even when no serious starvation exists" whereas "starvation does imply poverty" (id.). Famine in 1958-62 aside, Sen notes that the "elimination of starvation in socialist economies--for example China--seems to have taken place even without a dramatic rise in food availability per head, and indeed, typically the former has preceded the latter" (7).
Yang doesn’t mention "British refusal to ban rice exports from famine-affected Hunan" in 1906 or from Changsha in 1910 (Sen 161). This latter omission is particularly salient, as Yang argues that “With official priority placed on feeding the burgeoning urban population and importing machinery in exchange for grain exports, grain was all but snatched from peasant mouths” (19).
The Chinese state exported substantial grains in order to generate the currency necessary to purchase industrial equipment abroad. This is no mere incidental, but rather was intrinsic to the Great Leap Forward: industrializing as quickly as possible to catch the UK, the US, the USSR. Chapter 9 lays out the numbers in several succinct charts, regarding the amount of grains grown, procured, exported, and so on (320-49). It is no defense to suggest that someone else is guilty of one’s own crime--however, it suggests that sale of foods on the international market by the Maoists is the issue, rather than the property forms or the political despotism. We note that the same mechanism was in place during the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s: “at the beginning of the thirties, grain production decreased, bread was in short supply, and millions of peasants were starving,” and yet “Stalin insisted on exporting great quantities of grain” (Medvedev, Let History Judge, at 69). The common theme of the British exports, the Chinese exports, and the Soviet exports is that they are global market participation for profit without regard for the livelihood of the workers who produced the grain. The problem, then, is insufficient workers’ rights--that is, insufficient socialism.
The practice of imposing hardship on the working population in order to procure exportable crops reminds one rather of IMF austerity programs; Zhou boasted afterward that China “not only did not borrow one yuan in foreign debt, but we also repaid nearly all of our past foreign debt” and also contributed “aid to socialist and nationalist countries” (458). (Author cites this language as evidence that China’s foreign debt was not a proximate cause of the great famine. I’m inclined to agree that repayment of the debt was not the primary or even a major cause.) Export is maximized, services to internal population minimized, debts repaid. This is violation of the basic Marxist principle of providing for the producers; instead, the state expropriated the producers, the standard for capitalist economics: “intolerable is the fact that while China’s people starved, the government continued to export large quantities of grain” (Yang 450).
Even though author cites Sen otherwise for the proposition that "no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press" (16), the passages that I‘ve quoted above are not mentioned in this translation. Author continues with Sen: "China, although it was in many ways doing much better economically than India, still managed (unlike India) to have a famine" (id.). Given Sen’s other work, I find this usage of Sen to be at best manipulative.
Top rate is the presentation of memoranda, speeches, and other official statements by Mao, Zhou, Liu, and so on, regarding policy, ideological struggles, and the famine. These details are fascinating.
It is nevertheless the synthesis of the anecdotes/archives with the political memoranda/speeches that reveals author's recklessness. For instance, it’s routine to quote some memoranda from the government, and then note, post hoc ergo propter hoc that many deaths followed thereafter. So, Wu Zhipu, Henan’s governor at the pertinent time, is called out on the carpet for finding “grievous rightist errors” in the population and setting impractical, unrealistic industrial and agricultural targets (see e.g. 72-73 et seq.), leading inexorably to three millions dead in Henan (83). This process of quoting dumb commietalk and then highlighting deaths is pedestrian in the genre. Now, lest I sound like a scumbag defense attorney, the plaintiff lawyer in me counter-argues that it is a case of res ipsa loquitur: given the state monopoly over procurement and distribution, as well as the carceral institutions that compelled work and dictated residence, what other cause is even possible, let alone plausible? There can be no serious objection, as far as I’m concerned, that state policy is a proximate cause of the great famine--but the attempt to isolate policy as the sole cause, or, further, to isolate remote-seeming commietalk as the cause, is woefully inadequate. Famine historically is a political occurrence, with policy roots.
Another type of reckless inference is a repeated insistence that “no one dared speak the truth” (119, 191, &c.)--because of repressive techniques of the carceral apparatus--regarding exaggerated grain yields, overinvestment in steel production, failures of capital projects, food shortages, death tolls. While it is certainly fair to state that repressive techniques caused a chilling effect among those who knew that problems existed, it is inconsistent, page by page even, to suggest that no one dared speak the truth. We are, in fact, treated to many discussions of central committee members, local cadres, provincial officials, non-party members, and so on requesting relief, making grievances, filing oppositional memoranda, even taking arms against the state. Liu himself authored a tract against “rash advance” in industry and agriculture, for which he endured censure and underwent self-criticism. Zhou spoke out of turn and was disciplined. So, when Communist ideas are said to be “etched into every soul” (495), it can hardly be taken seriously, if there exist “right deviationists,” “right opportunists,” “left adventurists,” “left opportunists,” bourgeois peasants, degenerate elements, feudal remnants, and so on. We have, that is, an extraordinarily good presentation by author of the multi-layered debates that occurred at all levels during the great famine--but then we get categorical inferences that bear little relation to the evidence presented in the text, and arise instead out of the febrile clichés of the anti-communist genre.
The reckless inferential chains never become dishonest--except for the refutation of the official thesis that weather caused a natural disaster, leading inexorably to famine (452). Author contends, first, that the state “blamed it all on Mother Nature” (id.). The very next paragraphs, however, quote Liu for the proposition that “natural disaster was not the chief cause” and that the famine was “three parts natural disaster and seven parts man-made disaster” (id.). Author, second, contends that “the three years of the famine” were “in no way exceptional” (453). Analysis of rainfall and temperature thereafter follows, with several useful charts (453-56). Author suggests that some years during the famine were flood years, but only moderately, not worse than other years with no famine, whereas some years in the famine were drought years, each less severe than other times with no famine. Also, “divergence in [temperature productivity] for the years 1958-61 is not the largest for the forty-year period” (456). How weasely is that? The problem with the analysis is that each year is examined in isolation from other years. So, 1960 had a moderate drought, “less serious than in 1955, 1963, 1966, 1971, 1978, 1986, and 1988” (453), whereas 1959 and 1961 had less flooding than 1954, 1973, and so on (id.). Ergo, no weather problems! The chart helps visualize the effect: 1956-57 are normal, then 1958 has moderate drought, 1959 moderate flood, 1960 moderate drought, 1961 moderate flood--1962 is back to normal range (454). Cursory review of the other years cited for drought or flood are bordered by normal years on at least one side. The great famine sits astride four straight years of abnormality, alternating drought and flood. The aggregate effect, however, is not considered in author’s analysis.
Davis, in Late Victorian Holocausts, has considered this aggregation: “the ‘strong’ El Nino of 1957-59, which also produced a famous famine and nearly a million refugees in the Brazilian sertao was the likely culprit responsible for the onset of drought in 1958-59” (251). Davis passes along that “for the first time in human memory, people could actually wade across the Yellow River” (id.). Further review of the literature produces the conclusion that “‘the weather was the main cause of the enormous grain-yield losses in 1960 and 1961,’ but that the communes could still have survived the crisis without mass mortality if Beijing had not stupidly reduced its own sown acreage in 1959 (to divert labor to public works and backyard steel-making) and criminally enforced confiscatory procurement quotas in 1959-60,” the latter a reference to the export of grains (id).
The ultimate political thesis here is that the cause of 76 million aggregate human losses was "a ruthless suppression of political dissent with a highly centralized planned economy to produce a system that Mao Zedong himself characterized as 'Marx plus Qin Shihuang,'" a "combination of Soviet-style autocracy and ancient Chinese despotism" (17). The system at fault, therefore, is a palimpsest of the very ancient bleeding into the most modern, much as Pipes himself has described regarding the Russian Empire, a "peculiar type of political authority, blending native and Mongol elements, which arose in Moscow once the Golden Horde began to lossen its grip" (Russia under the Old Regime at 57). At the other end of the spectrum, Medvedev considers, then rejects, the popular thesis that "to explain Stalinism we have to return to earlier and earlier epochs of Russian history, very likely to the Tartar yoke"(Medvedev at 359)--but also concurs that "for centuries the cult of the tsar, the ideology of absolutism, had been ingrained in Russia" (Id., at 364). Those "centuries," we find, are long, as "the Novgorod Chronicle began referring to the new ruler not only as Khan Batu of the Mongols, but also as Tsar Batu, a title that literally meant Caesar Batu, signifying a new united rule over the many warring princely families of Russia," Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (150). Mao's reference to Qin Shihuang summons a ghost greater than a millennium more ancient than the Mongols in Russia, in view of which I am genuinely staggered. Mao accordingly became "the most powerful emperor who had ever ruled China" (17).
One very interesting late chapter addresses the issue of why, when “the Great Famine of the 1960s was unprecedented in scale,” did it not "give rise to major social turmoil?” (465). We are thereafter treated to a roll call of uprisings that did occur, as well as an approved list of totalitarian social controls that prevented rebellion. Uprisings “were more likely in the ethnic minority regions” (id.). A number of the uprisings described occur in and around Yunnan, which borders Burma in part. Author doesn’t get into it, but we know from Blum’s Killing Hope US Military and CIA Interventions that many of Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists took unlawful refuge in Burma and, organized and supplied by the CIA, began making incursions into Yunnan in the 1950s (Blum, at 23-24). The nationalists raided across the border and developed opium production in the Golden Triangle (25). So, some real subversion, omitted by Yang.
Text devolves from there, erecting a “communist fundamentalism” conceit (492-93), later to become “Marxist fundamentalism” (520), leading into the hackneyed suggestion that Mao gave us Pol Pot (521). A lengthy quotation of Herr Hayek (486) late in the volume seals it.
Last, an early admission reveals that the famine during the Great Leap Forward is different in degree, but not in kind, from prior Chinese famines: "most severe famine previously recorded occurred in 1928-30 [...] broke all previous records, but still killed only 10 million people" (13). Also, in 1920 through 1936, crop failures took the lives of 18.36 million people" (id.). These are crass statements, and reveal that this volume is, in part but not in whole, a hit piece, a concept assassination. "Only" 10 million? “Crop failures”? Famine is always already a political event. The point, of course, is that there is an interest here in minimizing prior famines, suppressing other parades of horribles, in order to effect a hayekian policy preference. This last is damning, in my not-at-all humble opinion.
All that said, a most substantial book on a most important subject. Highest recommendation.
August 2, 2017
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962, by Yang Jisheng is a chronicle of the Great Famine in China, where an estimated 15+ million Chinese starved to death due to policies implemented in the Great Leap Forward. These policies were designed to drive rapid agricultural production increases, push rural peasants into Communes, and move grain distribution and marketing firmly under government control. These policies began in 1959 and continued to 1961. Other policy choices included the expansion of backyard industries to produce ball bearings, pig iron and steel. Massive irrigation projects and deep plowing techniques were initiated to help bring up grain yields and redistribute labour into secondary industries. A Four Pests campaign was launched to target agricultural pests, including sparrows and certain insects. All of these combined policy changes had a massive negative impact on rural livelihood for the average Chinese peasant farmer, and created great hardship in the countryside. The policies were often ill-planned, and a debate raged in higher level circles about "rash advance" vs. slow implementation. The "rash advance" policy was heavily favoured by Chairman Mao, and was the winning philosophy over this three year period. It also led to a massive fall in grain production, a high death rate due to starvation, and massive government corruption and cover-up of the emerging crisis, as well as long-lasting environmental damage, poor and unusable industrial products, and wasted and fallow fields.
The Great Leap Forward was an unmitigated disaster in recent Chinese history, and it was heavily censored until more recent times. Even today, the shortcomings are played down in China, and Tombstone is a banned book on the mainland. This is because Jisheng is uncompromising in his criticism of CCP policies in this time period. Jisheng's own father died of starvation in his home village. Jisheng was a low ranking CCP party member at the time, and like many Chinese, believed the famine was an isolated incident, and did not connect the dots. This was because of a massive cover up attempt by the government, first blaming rightists, then middle-class peasants, and finally lower level party cadres for their "zeal." Many of the architects of these damaging policies did not face criticism, and many who spoke out were struggled by local party officials looking to deflect blame.
Jisheng travels across China, chronicling in detail the local implementation of Great Leap policies, and the subsequent demographic destruction unleashed in the countryside. In Henan Province, local officials zealously looted peasant homes looking for every scrap of food, and reported hugely inflated harvest rates, even while grain yields plummeted. Thousands upon thousands starved to death, and villagers began to eat wild plants, the bark from trees, and eventually human corpses. Cannibalism was prevalent during this period, and many stories of grave-robbing, murder and even eating ones own family members emerged. The same was true throughout China.
Jisheng analyzes Gansu province in detail as well, before moving on to a more China wide viewpoint. The CCP initiated Totalitarian control over Chinese citizens, collectivizing all possessions, forcing villagers to eat in communal kitchens, and sleep in military style barracks. Farm implements and animals were collectivized, and many farmers lost their livelihoods and incomes. This move to communal living gave local party cadres and officials great power over production teams, and allowed for the rampant inflation of reported yields to continue without question for years. This is because those who spoke out were harshly punished with reeducation, removal from the party, and sometimes death. It was often a death sentence for ones family as well. A privileged party position could bring benefits in extra food, but removal meant certain starvation. Party officials ruthlessly suppressed reports of famine, and sought out those who tried to leak information with brutality.
Jisheng has written a fantastic and brutal account of the famine. It is well researched, containing both government and other sources, as well as the authors own estimations from primary source documents. Although Jisheng is obviously critical of the CCP, he is not bent on revenge. His facts and figures are well presented, and he checks his figures with those offered by other sources, even praising official sources in some circumstances. Jisheng realizes the immense human drama that unfolded, beyond the graphs and numbers, and does a fantastic job touching on both the statistical and personal aspects of the famine. Jisheng ultimately blames the highest authorities, including Mao, for the famine, noting the terribly inept implementation of policy, and the overzealous move toward a communist utopia without adequate planning, study or research. The issues at the top trickled down to local officials and bureaucrats, which magnified the problem into the countryside. Millions starved throughout China in this failed utopian vision, and Jisheng is unflinching in both his cold and calculated analysis, and the personal dramas that unfold.
This was a fantastic read on a very dark period in human history. It is well written, researched and sourced, and offers a definitive viewpoint on the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. It is also an account of the failures of a totalitarian system, and on the shortcomings and dangers of utopian ideology. The prose is professional and literary, offering historical perspective, philosophical grounding and statistical backing. This was a very good account of the famine, and one not to be missed by history buffs. I could easily recommend this to anyone interested in Chinese history, and certainly enjoyed my time with it.
The Great Leap Forward was an unmitigated disaster in recent Chinese history, and it was heavily censored until more recent times. Even today, the shortcomings are played down in China, and Tombstone is a banned book on the mainland. This is because Jisheng is uncompromising in his criticism of CCP policies in this time period. Jisheng's own father died of starvation in his home village. Jisheng was a low ranking CCP party member at the time, and like many Chinese, believed the famine was an isolated incident, and did not connect the dots. This was because of a massive cover up attempt by the government, first blaming rightists, then middle-class peasants, and finally lower level party cadres for their "zeal." Many of the architects of these damaging policies did not face criticism, and many who spoke out were struggled by local party officials looking to deflect blame.
Jisheng travels across China, chronicling in detail the local implementation of Great Leap policies, and the subsequent demographic destruction unleashed in the countryside. In Henan Province, local officials zealously looted peasant homes looking for every scrap of food, and reported hugely inflated harvest rates, even while grain yields plummeted. Thousands upon thousands starved to death, and villagers began to eat wild plants, the bark from trees, and eventually human corpses. Cannibalism was prevalent during this period, and many stories of grave-robbing, murder and even eating ones own family members emerged. The same was true throughout China.
Jisheng analyzes Gansu province in detail as well, before moving on to a more China wide viewpoint. The CCP initiated Totalitarian control over Chinese citizens, collectivizing all possessions, forcing villagers to eat in communal kitchens, and sleep in military style barracks. Farm implements and animals were collectivized, and many farmers lost their livelihoods and incomes. This move to communal living gave local party cadres and officials great power over production teams, and allowed for the rampant inflation of reported yields to continue without question for years. This is because those who spoke out were harshly punished with reeducation, removal from the party, and sometimes death. It was often a death sentence for ones family as well. A privileged party position could bring benefits in extra food, but removal meant certain starvation. Party officials ruthlessly suppressed reports of famine, and sought out those who tried to leak information with brutality.
Jisheng has written a fantastic and brutal account of the famine. It is well researched, containing both government and other sources, as well as the authors own estimations from primary source documents. Although Jisheng is obviously critical of the CCP, he is not bent on revenge. His facts and figures are well presented, and he checks his figures with those offered by other sources, even praising official sources in some circumstances. Jisheng realizes the immense human drama that unfolded, beyond the graphs and numbers, and does a fantastic job touching on both the statistical and personal aspects of the famine. Jisheng ultimately blames the highest authorities, including Mao, for the famine, noting the terribly inept implementation of policy, and the overzealous move toward a communist utopia without adequate planning, study or research. The issues at the top trickled down to local officials and bureaucrats, which magnified the problem into the countryside. Millions starved throughout China in this failed utopian vision, and Jisheng is unflinching in both his cold and calculated analysis, and the personal dramas that unfold.
This was a fantastic read on a very dark period in human history. It is well written, researched and sourced, and offers a definitive viewpoint on the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. It is also an account of the failures of a totalitarian system, and on the shortcomings and dangers of utopian ideology. The prose is professional and literary, offering historical perspective, philosophical grounding and statistical backing. This was a very good account of the famine, and one not to be missed by history buffs. I could easily recommend this to anyone interested in Chinese history, and certainly enjoyed my time with it.
February 15, 2016
15:02:2016: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016...
Description: "I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death and perhaps for myself for writing this book."
Yang Jishen's book is banned in China. It is a passionate and angry account of one of the 20th century's most shocking man-made disasters. Based on an array of new sources and personal testimonies and written by someone who was a Communist Party insider with remarkable access to official archives, Tombstone is as significant and powerful a work as Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
Read by David Yip.
Produced and abridged by Jane Marshall A Jane Marshall production for BBC Radio 4.
---
FROM WIKI: Beginning in the early 1990s, Yang began interviewing people and collecting records of The Great Famine of 1959–1961, in which his own foster father had died, eventually accumulating ten million words of records. He published a two-volume 1,208 page account of the period, in which he meticulously cited his sources to prevent the Chinese government from dismissing it. It was widely acclaimed as being the definitive account of the Great Famine. He begins the book,
I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my [foster] father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book.
The book was published in Hong Kong and is banned in mainland China. In 2012 translations into French and German have been published.
------------
Upon finishing The Gulag Archipelago last week my mind wondered about a parallel from China, and here we are, the BBC answer my internal query.
#3 Xinyang prefecture in the rural country north of Shanghai was the region's main producer of grain, and yet the Chinese famine hit hardest in that lush region.
#4 While the Chinese peasants starved, the county cadres focused on meeting grain procurement quotas and blamed any shortfalls on 'right deviationist thinking'.
#5 Mao's support of the system of communal kitchens exacerbates China's famine disaster. As the peasants give up their allotments and livestock, they have no means of survival.
Description: "I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death and perhaps for myself for writing this book."
Yang Jishen's book is banned in China. It is a passionate and angry account of one of the 20th century's most shocking man-made disasters. Based on an array of new sources and personal testimonies and written by someone who was a Communist Party insider with remarkable access to official archives, Tombstone is as significant and powerful a work as Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
Read by David Yip.
Produced and abridged by Jane Marshall A Jane Marshall production for BBC Radio 4.
---
FROM WIKI: Beginning in the early 1990s, Yang began interviewing people and collecting records of The Great Famine of 1959–1961, in which his own foster father had died, eventually accumulating ten million words of records. He published a two-volume 1,208 page account of the period, in which he meticulously cited his sources to prevent the Chinese government from dismissing it. It was widely acclaimed as being the definitive account of the Great Famine. He begins the book,
I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my [foster] father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book.
The book was published in Hong Kong and is banned in mainland China. In 2012 translations into French and German have been published.
------------
Upon finishing The Gulag Archipelago last week my mind wondered about a parallel from China, and here we are, the BBC answer my internal query.
#3 Xinyang prefecture in the rural country north of Shanghai was the region's main producer of grain, and yet the Chinese famine hit hardest in that lush region.
#4 While the Chinese peasants starved, the county cadres focused on meeting grain procurement quotas and blamed any shortfalls on 'right deviationist thinking'.
#5 Mao's support of the system of communal kitchens exacerbates China's famine disaster. As the peasants give up their allotments and livestock, they have no means of survival.
December 17, 2012
I give it a four because of the research and the context that the research is put in, which is remarkable, important and devastating. It isn't an easy read, and certainly not an enjoyable one. It is utterly horrifying - 36 million dead (according to the author who seems to have done a more thorough job of backing up that claim than previous books have done with their numbers) from starvation and violence associated with the famine. It is as terrifying a depiction of the horrors perpetrated by ideology on society as I have ever read. If there are any lessons to be learned after getting through it, they are of the necessity of speaking truth to power and the vital importance of a free and independent press as any society's first line of defense. It is nauseating to think that any society, culture, political system was ever capable to doing something like this and cautionary to think that every society, culture and political system is capable of doing the same to lesser or greater degrees if left unchecked. This is an extremely scary book to read.
March 15, 2024
Yang Jisheng’s book is an excellent example of the distinction between a good book and a great reading experience. His study of the Chinese famine of 1958-62 provides a detailed account of the origins of the famine and its impact upon the population, one that is supported by interviews with survivors and information pried from still-restricted archives. He relates his findings in chapters filled with detail, which collectively make for powerful reading. Yet this is not the same as saying that Yang’s spare, factual prose is enjoyable reading, as the sheer enormity of his subject makes such an experience impossible.
Trying to master this enormity is no small feat. In this respect, Yang’s book serves as a refutation of the infamous line attributed to Joseph Stalin that while a single death is a tragedy, a million is just a statistic. Such reduction is even more difficult to resist when the toll is even greater, as estimates of the dead from the famine range from 15 to as many as 55 million people, with Yang himself admitting that his own research-based estimate of 36 million starvation deaths is probably too low. Even these numbers understate the scale of the crisis, as they leave out the other “unnatural deaths” resulting from the famine, and the shortfall in births both by choice and because of the physical effects of starvation. With such figures, it is too easy to lose a sense of the individuals who comprise them.
To identify the individuals who made up those numbers, Yang focuses on the famine in four provinces: Henan, Gansu, Sichuan, and Anhui. In separate chapters he describes the course of events in each of them, recounting the stories of the people who suffered and starved. This approach also allows him to describe the various responses by local and regional officials to the crisis as it unfolded before them. As peasants scraped bark off trees, dug up roots, and even resorted to cannibalism in their search for sustenance, the response of cadres ranged from outright denial that a food shortage even existed to requests for aid from the central government. Yet the efforts of those who resorted to the latter often led to their denunciation by their superiors as “right deviationists,” resulting in public humiliation, physical beatings, and dismissal from their posts.
That officials were subjected to such abuse underscores the man-made nature of this tragedy. As Yang notes, the famine was the result not of an environmental crisis such as drought or flooding, but of the central government’s determination to achieve through coercion their vision of a Communist economy. He traces the origin of the famine to the announcement at the Second Session of the Communist Party’s Eighth National Congress in May 1958 of the “Three Red Banners.” The climax of years of maneuvering by Mao Zedong, these directives set out the terms of the “Great Leap Forward,” which promised to lift China out of poverty and transform it into a leading industrial power. Key to this were the “people’s communes,” a more centralized form of local organization taking over the agricultural economy from the collectives that had only recently been established.
Thanks to the people’s communes, the central government was able to more ruthlessly exploit the agricultural resources and manpower needed to develop Chinese industry. Faced with demands from above to increase food production, party cadres competed with one another to set ever-higher targets for production. Not only did these unrealistic figures foster a perception of abundance that led initially to overconsumption by the peasants, the higher targets could only be met by drawing upon the stores the peasants set aside for the winter and even the seeds needed for next year’s harvest. Those cadres who attempted to feed their communities with food from reserves held by the government were denounced as right deviationists and forced from their positions. Naturally the examples set by such a response deterred others from making similar requests.
Without such evidence, there was little to deter Mao from his disastrous course. Here Yang offers a devastating dissection of the flaws in the totalitarian system he had constructed. Any external dissent had been silenced by the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” that had throttled the Hundred Flowers Movement, while the public debasement even of Mao’s closest comrades in the run-up to the announcement of the three Red Banners and the Lushan Conference afterward ensured that nobody amongst the elite would risk their position by challenging Mao’s direction of policy. All of this ensured that what few reports of famine reached Central Committee leaders were dismissed by a combination of indifference and crass personal prioritization, leaving the famine to grow unchecked.
By 1961, the effects of the famine became too detrimental to deny, with even Mao forced to admit to mistakes. Yet the legacy of the Great Famine would be felt for decades afterward, as the disagreements stemming from the renunciation of the policies that led to it prompted Mao to use the Cultural Revolution to cement his hold on power. To Yang, this was the opposite of the true lesson offered by the famine, which was the value of a modern democratic system that would be more responsive to the needs of China’s populace. Though his measured hopes that China might soon have such a system seem overly optimistic today, they only add to the value of his work as a warning of the pitfalls of a totalitarian state. While Yang’s limited engagement with the related industrialization campaign of the Great Leap Forward might detract from his publisher’s claims of it as the “definitive” book on the famine, it is nonetheless a powerful work that everyone with an interest in Chinese history or the history of the modern world should read. Just don’t expect it to be a pleasant one.
Trying to master this enormity is no small feat. In this respect, Yang’s book serves as a refutation of the infamous line attributed to Joseph Stalin that while a single death is a tragedy, a million is just a statistic. Such reduction is even more difficult to resist when the toll is even greater, as estimates of the dead from the famine range from 15 to as many as 55 million people, with Yang himself admitting that his own research-based estimate of 36 million starvation deaths is probably too low. Even these numbers understate the scale of the crisis, as they leave out the other “unnatural deaths” resulting from the famine, and the shortfall in births both by choice and because of the physical effects of starvation. With such figures, it is too easy to lose a sense of the individuals who comprise them.
To identify the individuals who made up those numbers, Yang focuses on the famine in four provinces: Henan, Gansu, Sichuan, and Anhui. In separate chapters he describes the course of events in each of them, recounting the stories of the people who suffered and starved. This approach also allows him to describe the various responses by local and regional officials to the crisis as it unfolded before them. As peasants scraped bark off trees, dug up roots, and even resorted to cannibalism in their search for sustenance, the response of cadres ranged from outright denial that a food shortage even existed to requests for aid from the central government. Yet the efforts of those who resorted to the latter often led to their denunciation by their superiors as “right deviationists,” resulting in public humiliation, physical beatings, and dismissal from their posts.
That officials were subjected to such abuse underscores the man-made nature of this tragedy. As Yang notes, the famine was the result not of an environmental crisis such as drought or flooding, but of the central government’s determination to achieve through coercion their vision of a Communist economy. He traces the origin of the famine to the announcement at the Second Session of the Communist Party’s Eighth National Congress in May 1958 of the “Three Red Banners.” The climax of years of maneuvering by Mao Zedong, these directives set out the terms of the “Great Leap Forward,” which promised to lift China out of poverty and transform it into a leading industrial power. Key to this were the “people’s communes,” a more centralized form of local organization taking over the agricultural economy from the collectives that had only recently been established.
Thanks to the people’s communes, the central government was able to more ruthlessly exploit the agricultural resources and manpower needed to develop Chinese industry. Faced with demands from above to increase food production, party cadres competed with one another to set ever-higher targets for production. Not only did these unrealistic figures foster a perception of abundance that led initially to overconsumption by the peasants, the higher targets could only be met by drawing upon the stores the peasants set aside for the winter and even the seeds needed for next year’s harvest. Those cadres who attempted to feed their communities with food from reserves held by the government were denounced as right deviationists and forced from their positions. Naturally the examples set by such a response deterred others from making similar requests.
Without such evidence, there was little to deter Mao from his disastrous course. Here Yang offers a devastating dissection of the flaws in the totalitarian system he had constructed. Any external dissent had been silenced by the “Anti-Rightist Campaign” that had throttled the Hundred Flowers Movement, while the public debasement even of Mao’s closest comrades in the run-up to the announcement of the three Red Banners and the Lushan Conference afterward ensured that nobody amongst the elite would risk their position by challenging Mao’s direction of policy. All of this ensured that what few reports of famine reached Central Committee leaders were dismissed by a combination of indifference and crass personal prioritization, leaving the famine to grow unchecked.
By 1961, the effects of the famine became too detrimental to deny, with even Mao forced to admit to mistakes. Yet the legacy of the Great Famine would be felt for decades afterward, as the disagreements stemming from the renunciation of the policies that led to it prompted Mao to use the Cultural Revolution to cement his hold on power. To Yang, this was the opposite of the true lesson offered by the famine, which was the value of a modern democratic system that would be more responsive to the needs of China’s populace. Though his measured hopes that China might soon have such a system seem overly optimistic today, they only add to the value of his work as a warning of the pitfalls of a totalitarian state. While Yang’s limited engagement with the related industrialization campaign of the Great Leap Forward might detract from his publisher’s claims of it as the “definitive” book on the famine, it is nonetheless a powerful work that everyone with an interest in Chinese history or the history of the modern world should read. Just don’t expect it to be a pleasant one.
July 25, 2021
This is one of “those” books—where I start with the audiobook and order the physical copy before I’m even halfway through. Because it’s so powerful that I need to have it as a reference…and I need to share it with everyone who wants to hear (still trying to get my dad to read this one).
I waited so long to write my review of this because it honestly impacted me in such a huge way. I am still thinking about it months later because of how devastating and real this narrative is. This enormous part of history where millions needlessly died was never taught to me in my American school (and is it taught in China? Yeah right). I will recommend this book as required reading for everybody, and I mean everybody. Soak it up, feel all the pain and anguish and devastation, because this is not an event that should be forgotten.
I waited so long to write my review of this because it honestly impacted me in such a huge way. I am still thinking about it months later because of how devastating and real this narrative is. This enormous part of history where millions needlessly died was never taught to me in my American school (and is it taught in China? Yeah right). I will recommend this book as required reading for everybody, and I mean everybody. Soak it up, feel all the pain and anguish and devastation, because this is not an event that should be forgotten.
May 17, 2017
Flipped through this in a bookstore and found it really hard to put down. Absolutely devastating and horrific... So much suffering, and so recent... Corroborates what my parents told me growing up, but not so much graphic detail. A really traumatising read, but hats off to the author for raising awareness of this horrible episode of Chinese history that has been repressed for too long (and this book is still banned in China as far as I am aware).
February 6, 2017
I did not write a review when I read it, but I think the New York Review of Books review http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/... takes care of business. A must-read book. Painful, but necessary.
Excerpts from the NYRB review:
The Xinyang Incident is the subject of the first chapter of Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng’s epic account of the worst famine in history. Yang conservatively estimates that 36 million people died of unnatural causes, mostly due to starvation but also government-instigated torture and murder of those who opposed the Communist Party’s maniacal economic plans that caused the catastrophe. Its epicenter was Xinyang County, where one in eight people died from the famine. The sixty pages Yang spends on Xinyang are a tour de force, a brutal vignette of people dying at the sides of roads, family members eating one another to survive, police blocking refugees from leaving villages, and desperate pleas ignored by Mao Zedong and his spineless courtiers. It is a chapter that describes a society laid so low that the famine’s effects are still felt half a century later..
..iginally published in 2008, the Chinese version of Tombstone is a legendary book in China.1 It is hard to find an intellectual in Beijing who has not read it, even though it remains banned and was only published in Hong Kong. Yang’s great success is using the Communist Party’s own records to document, as he puts it, “a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics.”
Tombstone is a landmark in the Chinese people’s own efforts to confront their history, despite the fact that the party responsible for the Great Famine is still in power. This fact is often lost on outsiders who wonder why the Chinese haven’t delved into their history as deeply as the Germans or Russians or Cambodians. In this sense, Yang is like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: someone inside the system trying to uncover its darkest secrets.
..Despite his personal loss, Yang remains sober and balanced throughout the book. He lays the blame firmly on the top leaders—not just Mao but also supposed moderates like Liu and Zhou. In imperial China, Yang says, power was centered in the Confucian bureaucracy but the truth lay in religion and philosophical texts, such as the Confucian classics. In Maoist China, by contrast, the leader was the sage, meaning there was no ideological alternative to Mao. “China’s government became a secular theocracy that united the center of power with the center of truth” is Yang’s pithy but telling analysis.
Yang doesn’t spare Mao, Liu, or Zhou, but he also blames Chinese society for wanting to believe that leaders had a quick and easy solution to China’s backwardness. Mostly, he blames the Communist political system for allowing such a leader as Mao to take power—a far more damning indictment of today’s China than simply blaming Mao:
The problem lay in arbitrary and dictatorial decision making at the expense of good practice, and coercive implementation that deprived people of their rights and property. Both flaws were rooted in the political system...
Excerpts from the NYRB review:
The Xinyang Incident is the subject of the first chapter of Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng’s epic account of the worst famine in history. Yang conservatively estimates that 36 million people died of unnatural causes, mostly due to starvation but also government-instigated torture and murder of those who opposed the Communist Party’s maniacal economic plans that caused the catastrophe. Its epicenter was Xinyang County, where one in eight people died from the famine. The sixty pages Yang spends on Xinyang are a tour de force, a brutal vignette of people dying at the sides of roads, family members eating one another to survive, police blocking refugees from leaving villages, and desperate pleas ignored by Mao Zedong and his spineless courtiers. It is a chapter that describes a society laid so low that the famine’s effects are still felt half a century later..
..iginally published in 2008, the Chinese version of Tombstone is a legendary book in China.1 It is hard to find an intellectual in Beijing who has not read it, even though it remains banned and was only published in Hong Kong. Yang’s great success is using the Communist Party’s own records to document, as he puts it, “a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics.”
Tombstone is a landmark in the Chinese people’s own efforts to confront their history, despite the fact that the party responsible for the Great Famine is still in power. This fact is often lost on outsiders who wonder why the Chinese haven’t delved into their history as deeply as the Germans or Russians or Cambodians. In this sense, Yang is like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: someone inside the system trying to uncover its darkest secrets.
..Despite his personal loss, Yang remains sober and balanced throughout the book. He lays the blame firmly on the top leaders—not just Mao but also supposed moderates like Liu and Zhou. In imperial China, Yang says, power was centered in the Confucian bureaucracy but the truth lay in religion and philosophical texts, such as the Confucian classics. In Maoist China, by contrast, the leader was the sage, meaning there was no ideological alternative to Mao. “China’s government became a secular theocracy that united the center of power with the center of truth” is Yang’s pithy but telling analysis.
Yang doesn’t spare Mao, Liu, or Zhou, but he also blames Chinese society for wanting to believe that leaders had a quick and easy solution to China’s backwardness. Mostly, he blames the Communist political system for allowing such a leader as Mao to take power—a far more damning indictment of today’s China than simply blaming Mao:
The problem lay in arbitrary and dictatorial decision making at the expense of good practice, and coercive implementation that deprived people of their rights and property. Both flaws were rooted in the political system...
November 12, 2020
Moved to gwern.net.
December 23, 2021
“Tombstone” is a mammoth, granular ledger of the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1962), memorializing the catastrophe in a level of detail that is frankly astonishing.
I was deeply moved by Yang’s conception of this project, which he outlines in the introduction. The book is literally a tombstone. In the face of the Chinese government’s various distortions and erasures of the history of the Great Leap Forward and the resulting Great Famine, Yang erects this book — this tombstone — so that the estimated 36 million victims may be remembered. His project is to document the Great Famine with such immense, exacting detail that it cannot ever again be disputed or forgotten. For Yang, the project is personal: in 1959, he watched his own father starve to death. He writes mainly for an audience of a future time to ensure that they will know what happened. The result is a towering achievement that does honor to Yang’s purpose. As a dissident writer who continues to live in China, Yang risks a great deal by writing such an excoriating account.
On to substance: the book is exhausting. The significantly abridged English translation pushes 700 pages, compared to the original Mandarin edition published in Hong Kong that exceeds 1200 pages. On every page, suffering. Some of the suffering documented by Yang is so extreme that I had to put the book down for days at a time. Detailed firsthand accounts of cannibalism, infanticide, starvation, suicide, torture. You pick up a 700 page book about a famine and expect it to be dark, but nothing quite prepares you for what you encounter inside. It is unrelenting.
The book makes a thorough and compelling case for policy failures of the Great Leap Forward driving the famine. From impossible production quotas to mandated uniform planting standards that made no sense, from diversion of agricultural workers to massive industrial projects to communal kitchens and grain requisitions, Yang shows how at every turn the central government caused and then exacerbated famine conditions. Underlaying everything is a fanatical, paranoid atmosphere that led many officials to forge agricultural yield numbers and deny reality so as not to be denounced as a counter revolutionary or face reprisals as a “right deviationist.” Many who tried to speak out about or intervene in the famine are shown to have been punished as enemies of the state trying to subvert Mao’s revolution. The detail and explanatory power of Yang’s account on this front is impressive, and devastating.
Beyond its extraordinary length, though, there were other areas that gave me pause. Yang’s reporting is generally a very stoic rundown of the facts, but occasionally, flashes of sudden spurious editorial or conspicuous gloss raised my eyebrows. For one small example among many such small examples: in emphasizing that the Great Famine was different in nature than famines in China that preceded it, Yang writes that the largest previous famine in China “only” killed 10 million people. The airy “only” in that sentence is doing a lot of work: for scale, the famous Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852 killed an estimated 1 million people; the 1932-1933 Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine killed about 3.5 million. Perhaps those famines resulted in larger death tolls in proportion to their respective national populations, but certain moments like that “only” 10 million line sometimes made me wary of how willing Yang may be to bend information in suit of his argument about Mao’s policy failures being central to the famine. Another example would be Yang’s brief, from-the-hip claim that Mao bears responsibility for establishing Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and what came after. The claim reads as underdeveloped and tenuous, and yet again aimed at maximizing the amount of fault that can be placed upon Mao. I’m not sure that this is necessarily an incorrect assessment: it is simply that the sometimes presentation of such editorial and gloss material throughout the text unsettled me, and made room to wonder about the work’s overall objectivity. This discomfort is accentuated by multiple favorable references to libertarian thinkers like Hayek throughout the book, and repeated (seemingly) clumsy conflations of Marxism, Maoism, totalitarianism, and communism, which read as though used interchangeably in the text. All of which is a shame, because the most important parts of the text (in my view) read as straight reporting. In this way, the vast bulk of the text is cast into the shadow of a very small part.
As is true for any work of translation, I should add the caveat that — being unable to read “Tombstone” in the original Mandarin — I cannot judge where responsibility for the book’s flaws lay between the author and the team of translators. That’s certainly a gap in my perspective as a reader here. But let that not be read as a diss of the translation team, which on the whole seems to have done a remarkable job at translating this gargantuan tome. While heavy and sometimes dry, the translation is highly readable, and it is an invaluable public service to have carried this important record into reach of English-reading audiences around the world.
On the whole, I am very grateful that I read this book — and that Yang dedicated decades of his life to gathering the primary sources needed to write it. It is a book worthy of his intention; it is indeed a tombstone, a memorial. It’s a remarkable, courageous feat of research and writing. I would not at all recommend this book to someone with casual interest given the length, density, and weight, but I recommend it enthusiastically to anyone who wants to delve deeply into the history of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine. I will think about this book for a long time, and I look forward to (eventually) reading Yang’s companion history of the Cultural Revolution, “The World Turned Upside Down.”
I was deeply moved by Yang’s conception of this project, which he outlines in the introduction. The book is literally a tombstone. In the face of the Chinese government’s various distortions and erasures of the history of the Great Leap Forward and the resulting Great Famine, Yang erects this book — this tombstone — so that the estimated 36 million victims may be remembered. His project is to document the Great Famine with such immense, exacting detail that it cannot ever again be disputed or forgotten. For Yang, the project is personal: in 1959, he watched his own father starve to death. He writes mainly for an audience of a future time to ensure that they will know what happened. The result is a towering achievement that does honor to Yang’s purpose. As a dissident writer who continues to live in China, Yang risks a great deal by writing such an excoriating account.
On to substance: the book is exhausting. The significantly abridged English translation pushes 700 pages, compared to the original Mandarin edition published in Hong Kong that exceeds 1200 pages. On every page, suffering. Some of the suffering documented by Yang is so extreme that I had to put the book down for days at a time. Detailed firsthand accounts of cannibalism, infanticide, starvation, suicide, torture. You pick up a 700 page book about a famine and expect it to be dark, but nothing quite prepares you for what you encounter inside. It is unrelenting.
The book makes a thorough and compelling case for policy failures of the Great Leap Forward driving the famine. From impossible production quotas to mandated uniform planting standards that made no sense, from diversion of agricultural workers to massive industrial projects to communal kitchens and grain requisitions, Yang shows how at every turn the central government caused and then exacerbated famine conditions. Underlaying everything is a fanatical, paranoid atmosphere that led many officials to forge agricultural yield numbers and deny reality so as not to be denounced as a counter revolutionary or face reprisals as a “right deviationist.” Many who tried to speak out about or intervene in the famine are shown to have been punished as enemies of the state trying to subvert Mao’s revolution. The detail and explanatory power of Yang’s account on this front is impressive, and devastating.
Beyond its extraordinary length, though, there were other areas that gave me pause. Yang’s reporting is generally a very stoic rundown of the facts, but occasionally, flashes of sudden spurious editorial or conspicuous gloss raised my eyebrows. For one small example among many such small examples: in emphasizing that the Great Famine was different in nature than famines in China that preceded it, Yang writes that the largest previous famine in China “only” killed 10 million people. The airy “only” in that sentence is doing a lot of work: for scale, the famous Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852 killed an estimated 1 million people; the 1932-1933 Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine killed about 3.5 million. Perhaps those famines resulted in larger death tolls in proportion to their respective national populations, but certain moments like that “only” 10 million line sometimes made me wary of how willing Yang may be to bend information in suit of his argument about Mao’s policy failures being central to the famine. Another example would be Yang’s brief, from-the-hip claim that Mao bears responsibility for establishing Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and what came after. The claim reads as underdeveloped and tenuous, and yet again aimed at maximizing the amount of fault that can be placed upon Mao. I’m not sure that this is necessarily an incorrect assessment: it is simply that the sometimes presentation of such editorial and gloss material throughout the text unsettled me, and made room to wonder about the work’s overall objectivity. This discomfort is accentuated by multiple favorable references to libertarian thinkers like Hayek throughout the book, and repeated (seemingly) clumsy conflations of Marxism, Maoism, totalitarianism, and communism, which read as though used interchangeably in the text. All of which is a shame, because the most important parts of the text (in my view) read as straight reporting. In this way, the vast bulk of the text is cast into the shadow of a very small part.
As is true for any work of translation, I should add the caveat that — being unable to read “Tombstone” in the original Mandarin — I cannot judge where responsibility for the book’s flaws lay between the author and the team of translators. That’s certainly a gap in my perspective as a reader here. But let that not be read as a diss of the translation team, which on the whole seems to have done a remarkable job at translating this gargantuan tome. While heavy and sometimes dry, the translation is highly readable, and it is an invaluable public service to have carried this important record into reach of English-reading audiences around the world.
On the whole, I am very grateful that I read this book — and that Yang dedicated decades of his life to gathering the primary sources needed to write it. It is a book worthy of his intention; it is indeed a tombstone, a memorial. It’s a remarkable, courageous feat of research and writing. I would not at all recommend this book to someone with casual interest given the length, density, and weight, but I recommend it enthusiastically to anyone who wants to delve deeply into the history of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine. I will think about this book for a long time, and I look forward to (eventually) reading Yang’s companion history of the Cultural Revolution, “The World Turned Upside Down.”
March 28, 2021
"On every page of Tombstone you see detailed case studies of what Hayek warned about: the pretense of knowledge as political leaders thought they could do away with the family and individual initiative, but ended up starving 36 million people to death in the mother of all unintended consequences; the ludicrousness of an economic system which tries to do away with prices to provide information, signals, and incentives, and replaces it with command and control; the dangers of repressing freedom and thereby creating a cruel silence which allowed starvation conditions to continue." - John Taylor
While submitting my Political Science Honors Thesis into my advisor's mailbox, I crossed paths on a stairwell with Edward Friedman, an editor of Tombstone's English edition and my International Political Economy professor. I asked him why Mao held such power and esteem for so long, when I have so far had yet to find any redeeming trait in his word in deed. Beyond the repressive realities of totalitarianism, he explained this anomaly-cum-tragedy through Max Weber's Tripartite classification of authority, chiefly the charismatic kind.
This book is a detailed lesson about such power (socialism & authoritarianism) without accountability (capitalism & democracy). After a few hundred pages describing the barbarities brought about by empty stomachs have inured the reader to a futile struggle within a recourse-less hell on earth, he or she can dispassionately analyze the ingenuity of human beings in best guaranteeing their own survival. China's peasants and party members were just as clever then as they are now, but were forced by the Communist winds to apply their individuality towards either circumventing the all-encompassing genocidal whims of Mao, or serving as his deluded sycophants.
Gradual economic liberalization since the Deng era toppled one crucial barrier to freedom and prosperity, but the final tombstone, authoritarianism, still stands untrammeled. After reading Tombstone, one cannot hope for the CCP's final reckoning to come sooner. - June 2013
While submitting my Political Science Honors Thesis into my advisor's mailbox, I crossed paths on a stairwell with Edward Friedman, an editor of Tombstone's English edition and my International Political Economy professor. I asked him why Mao held such power and esteem for so long, when I have so far had yet to find any redeeming trait in his word in deed. Beyond the repressive realities of totalitarianism, he explained this anomaly-cum-tragedy through Max Weber's Tripartite classification of authority, chiefly the charismatic kind.
This book is a detailed lesson about such power (socialism & authoritarianism) without accountability (capitalism & democracy). After a few hundred pages describing the barbarities brought about by empty stomachs have inured the reader to a futile struggle within a recourse-less hell on earth, he or she can dispassionately analyze the ingenuity of human beings in best guaranteeing their own survival. China's peasants and party members were just as clever then as they are now, but were forced by the Communist winds to apply their individuality towards either circumventing the all-encompassing genocidal whims of Mao, or serving as his deluded sycophants.
Gradual economic liberalization since the Deng era toppled one crucial barrier to freedom and prosperity, but the final tombstone, authoritarianism, still stands untrammeled. After reading Tombstone, one cannot hope for the CCP's final reckoning to come sooner. - June 2013
October 27, 2013
Didnt finish...too long and too depressing. Interesting though, but it read more like a government report than a good readable history book.
Im sure there are more page-turning accounts of the Great Famine even if they arent as well researched and chock full of data. Yang has incredibly painstakingly researched data, quotes, stats, etc. Not what I needed though.
Im sure there are more page-turning accounts of the Great Famine even if they arent as well researched and chock full of data. Yang has incredibly painstakingly researched data, quotes, stats, etc. Not what I needed though.
March 27, 2022
oh my deary goodness me this is amazing, not the famine, but the sheer depth of research got me super interested in average rainfall and relative resource deficiency and disastrous economic planning THIS IS CLASS
June 4, 2019
A Grim Reminder of Dangers of Authoritarian Leadership
Yang Jisheng's Tombstone, the Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, is not the kind of book I could rate based on nothing more than how much I did or did not like it. The subject matter is much too deep for that and the dangers the author endured to write this phenomenal work far too real.
Jisheng's account as presented to us in the English-language edition of Tombstone is a single-volume 629-page condensed version of the original Chinese-language 1,200-page 2-volume set first published in Hong Kong a decade ago. There's no need to question what may or may not have been lost in translation because Jisheng provided so much fact-based data with which to work in the original publication.
Moreover, Tombstone is much more than just a triumph of historical writing. It represents in many ways the triumph of a movement to shed light on "the worst famine in human history." As an integral part of that movement: "Yang got people who experienced the famine to describe it in their own words. He found local journalists who'd witnessed and reported on murders and starvation and got them to write their memoirs. He located and interviewed local implementers of the fatal policies. He got surviving resisters to recount their experiences" (pp. X-XI).
Magnitude of the Horror
It took a while for me to adjust my brain to magnitude of the fact that the horror described actually occurred less than 70 years ago. In that hellish avoidable atrocity an estimated 30 to 45 million people died within a four-year period basically because of authoritarian arrogance and a total disregard for the freedom of individuals...
To read my complete essay on this title and view accompanying videos please visit at:
https://www.author-poet-aberjhani.inf...
Aberjhani
author of
and co-author of
Yang Jisheng's Tombstone, the Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, is not the kind of book I could rate based on nothing more than how much I did or did not like it. The subject matter is much too deep for that and the dangers the author endured to write this phenomenal work far too real.
Jisheng's account as presented to us in the English-language edition of Tombstone is a single-volume 629-page condensed version of the original Chinese-language 1,200-page 2-volume set first published in Hong Kong a decade ago. There's no need to question what may or may not have been lost in translation because Jisheng provided so much fact-based data with which to work in the original publication.
Moreover, Tombstone is much more than just a triumph of historical writing. It represents in many ways the triumph of a movement to shed light on "the worst famine in human history." As an integral part of that movement: "Yang got people who experienced the famine to describe it in their own words. He found local journalists who'd witnessed and reported on murders and starvation and got them to write their memoirs. He located and interviewed local implementers of the fatal policies. He got surviving resisters to recount their experiences" (pp. X-XI).
Magnitude of the Horror
It took a while for me to adjust my brain to magnitude of the fact that the horror described actually occurred less than 70 years ago. In that hellish avoidable atrocity an estimated 30 to 45 million people died within a four-year period basically because of authoritarian arrogance and a total disregard for the freedom of individuals...
To read my complete essay on this title and view accompanying videos please visit at:
https://www.author-poet-aberjhani.inf...
Aberjhani
author of
and co-author of
November 1, 2014
Yang's book is a very thorough exhaustive and exhausting history of the Great Chinese Famine that was the direct result of the Great Leap Forward. In wondering how 36 million people died of starvation (with an estimated 76 million total decline in potential population due to a dramatically curtailed birth rate along with the unnatural death rate), this book details policies, politicians' and civilians' actions that all contributed to this disaster. This book is thoroughly researched and documented. One of the most important aspects of this book that made me want to read it and continue reading it is that it is based upon Chinese archival material and through eyewitness accounts. Yang's book is nothing short of overwhelming though. His account details the inhumanity starvation caused as society broke down during these years. The barbaric behavior of so many is presented again and again through actions such as widespread cannibalism, corruption, ambivalence, deception, and ignorance. Therein lies the problem though. Yang has so much material in this book that the accounts he presents seem to reoccur endlessly in the book. The fact that this single volume was condensed from the original publication in two volumes is stunning since I cannot imagine reading two volumes of this. This one volume was more than enough for me. Yang presents an enormous amount of data, but his descriptions of that data is mind-numbingly dull at times. This book is probably best appreciated by experienced historians and scholars of modern China. This book will help any serious student of contemporary China to understand the emergence of the modern state of the People's Republic of China as it left behind a horrific tragedy.
January 3, 2013
A very difficult book to read but anyone who is an admirer of China should attempt. When you have finished the book you will better understand that the edifice that is the Chinese Communist Party cannot endure. And it is yet another blow to the reputation of Mao Zedong - possibly the largest mass murderer in history. Reading this book was like watching a horror movie - it was appalling that the 'religion' of communism could allow people to ignore the starvation of their own people.
February 3, 2013
You probably don't want to read this book in its entirety because: 1) it's too depressing; 2) it's way too detailed for a lay reader, and can get repetitive. However, no doubt it's a very well-researched book for those who are interested in the details of this period of the contemporary Chinese history.
The fact that the author freely lives in Beijing shows that China has come a long way from the days described in this book.
The fact that the author freely lives in Beijing shows that China has come a long way from the days described in this book.
dnf
September 14, 2025DNF. I appreciate the sheer amount of difficult research that must've gone into this, given that it involved interviewing countless people and digging up documents that the mid-century CCP no doubt went to great lengths to bury. However, this is more a large collection of vital historical data than it is a nonfiction narrative, and as such, it's rather difficult for me to maintain interest in reading it. It's mostly numbers, locations, quotes, and numerous similar anecdotes about the incidents that occurred during the famine. Definitely important for maintaining a historical record of the events, but not so much an engaging story in and of itself.
March 8, 2013
I was expecting a bit more of a narrative structure, so I found this book to be incredibly dense. It is well-researched and leaves few devastating details untold. It is shocking now to think that something like this happened within such recent memory, but is a good lesson on the power of such a regime and how quickly things can get out of control.
The book alternates between chapters of "what happened" (very interesting) and the political climate that made it possible (so confusing, so many names, so many places - I would have liked an org chart and accompanying map!).
Unless you are a devotee of recent Chinese history, this is probably not the book for you. It is plodding and methodical, but full of rich historical facts and transcripts. I was surprised that some of the transcripts and internal communist party memos had been allowed to be re-printed.
The book alternates between chapters of "what happened" (very interesting) and the political climate that made it possible (so confusing, so many names, so many places - I would have liked an org chart and accompanying map!).
Unless you are a devotee of recent Chinese history, this is probably not the book for you. It is plodding and methodical, but full of rich historical facts and transcripts. I was surprised that some of the transcripts and internal communist party memos had been allowed to be re-printed.
December 4, 2016
As a book, this was truly appalling - there was no narrative, no coherence, and no discernible chronology. Yang attempts to convince the reader through volume of evidence rather than force of argument, with admittedly comprehensive facts and in-depth contemporary accounts. But the latter 450 pages (of 500) offer no new insight - it is repeatedly about a totalitarian polity requiring systemic lies as a requisite for survival, in turn perpetuating unrealistic goals and a corrupt and misleading despotism causing The Great Chinese Famine. Beyond the impressive amount of research conducted by Yang, this book adds nothing to the conventional analysis or insights of the period.
October 22, 2015
Unfortunately, this book exemplifies the Stalinist adage that "a million is a statistic". In attempting to do justice to the many, many victims of the Great Leap Forward, even this version abridged for Western audiences gets bogged down in myriad similar tragedies, with the net effect that it becomes a paradoxically dry account.
Though no doubt a valuable document for historians, this is quite a difficult read for the wrong reasons.
Though no doubt a valuable document for historians, this is quite a difficult read for the wrong reasons.
March 11, 2019
This book is horrible in what it depicts. I had to stop reading it twice because the litany of evil so so overwhelming. But that makes it a "must read" for all sorts of reasons. I'd like to hope we don't see this again, but as it's taking place in Nth Korea now, and in some parts of Africa, we can never rest.
June 5, 2019
Solid and gruesome read of the worst famine (man made or natural) in history!! The Great Leap forward was one of the greatest mass murdering events in all of history as well! All because of Chairman Mao and his minions!!
September 22, 2012
This is a great book -- it provides a profound analysis of the Communist system, which generated unprecedented famine under Mao.
December 13, 2025
finished my 2 600 pages books! finally! i think i might go shorter for a while. loved reading about ma0 china and len!n russia at the same time, and was able to draw many parallels. this book is 3 stars because it is dull in comparison with len!n the dictator and unreadable compared to the paragon of historical storytelling, america and iran 1720-present. holding it to that standard, it may be 2 stars, but giving some grace since this book was originally printed in chinese, shortened significantly, and probably lost some in translation.
i’ll focus this analysis on my 2 favorite quotes, both from the first 5 pages of the book, which i believe serve as the essence of jisheng’s arguments:
“a tombstone is a memory made concrete. human memory is the ladder on which a country and a people advance. we must remember not only the good things, but also the bad; the bright spots, but also the darkness. the authorities in a totalitarian system strive to conceal their faults and extol their merits, gloss over their errors and forcibly eradicate all memory of man-made calamity, darkness, and evil. for that reason, the chinese are prone to historical amnesia imposed by those in power. i erect this tombstone so that people will remember and henceforth renounce man-made calamity, darkness, and evil.” (jisheng, 3)
the great leap forward, which tombstone centers upon, caused the worst famine (>40 million dead) in human history amidst reports of “sputnik harvests,” increased export of foodstuffs, and typical weather patterns. it was entirely man-made, caused by militant adherence to a totalitarian regime that punished cadres who suggested tapping into the food reserves or allowing private cultivation with public execution (“struggle sessions”), as distribution of rations was integral to state surveillance. in pursuit of the ideal of “commun!sm in x years,” peasants who knew the land best were unable to cultivate it for non-collective consumption or even consult on how it should be used. instead, officials who knew nothing about farming issued chaotic directives such as using rice paddy land for soybeans, destroying the mature rice crop that, if harvested, would have saved hundreds of thousands, and in many cases not yielding a single edible soybean. this understandably eroded the masses’ trust in the deified chairman mao [who often proclaimed that he took inspiration from prior emperors] and decreased their motivation to work. some resorted to eating their own family members-> these stories, malnourished corpses, and accurate death tolls were systematically hidden by well-fed local cadres, who could face punishment for “dashing cold water on the great leap forward.”
jisheng allows that there were several (superficial) attempts by the central government to right the wrongs of unscrupulous lower-level cadres. these cadres ironically executed the central committees’ directives more harshly than the central committee itself did, but bore the brunt of the blame for mass starvation. the criticism that reached mao was limited based on officials’ desires for self preservation and safety for their families, and mao claimed to be frustrated at the dearth of truthful news he was receiving. this is despite the fact that mao proudly considered himself the chinese stalin, which intensified the rift between the soviet union and china once khrushchev took power and vilified stalin. some historians believe that this rivalry with the soviet union helped spur the great leap forward.
“knowing my life was hard at school, my father had called me home to eat the buffalo [whom he had raised] meat. as soon as i entered the house, i smelled an alluring odor. but my father ate none of the meat. he said he had been too close to the buffalo, there had been an understanding between them, and he couldn’t eat the meat. in fact, he was just making an excuse to let me eat all of it. i wolfed it down as he watched, his eyes glowing with kindness. now i wondered had he eaten that buffalo meat whether his condition might not be so desperate [jisheng watched his father die of starvation less than 3 days later].” (jisheng, 5)
this serves as a testament to the ideological brainwashing that existed in china at the time-> even after this experience, jisheng remained a part of his communist youth group. it also pulls my heartstrings, as my parents are from sichuan, the hardest hit province, and were born in 1962 and 1965. a couple months before my last grandparent died, my grandma (who had alzheimers at the time), offered every spoonful of food she ate to my mother and i before eating. in learning about how evil some left!st leaders who learned from lenin are, i have developed more empathy for my parents, who do not share my views. while i don’t think my fundamental morals or values have changed, this book in tandem with len!n the dictator have added more color as to how they can be corrupted in an imperfect world.
i’ll focus this analysis on my 2 favorite quotes, both from the first 5 pages of the book, which i believe serve as the essence of jisheng’s arguments:
“a tombstone is a memory made concrete. human memory is the ladder on which a country and a people advance. we must remember not only the good things, but also the bad; the bright spots, but also the darkness. the authorities in a totalitarian system strive to conceal their faults and extol their merits, gloss over their errors and forcibly eradicate all memory of man-made calamity, darkness, and evil. for that reason, the chinese are prone to historical amnesia imposed by those in power. i erect this tombstone so that people will remember and henceforth renounce man-made calamity, darkness, and evil.” (jisheng, 3)
the great leap forward, which tombstone centers upon, caused the worst famine (>40 million dead) in human history amidst reports of “sputnik harvests,” increased export of foodstuffs, and typical weather patterns. it was entirely man-made, caused by militant adherence to a totalitarian regime that punished cadres who suggested tapping into the food reserves or allowing private cultivation with public execution (“struggle sessions”), as distribution of rations was integral to state surveillance. in pursuit of the ideal of “commun!sm in x years,” peasants who knew the land best were unable to cultivate it for non-collective consumption or even consult on how it should be used. instead, officials who knew nothing about farming issued chaotic directives such as using rice paddy land for soybeans, destroying the mature rice crop that, if harvested, would have saved hundreds of thousands, and in many cases not yielding a single edible soybean. this understandably eroded the masses’ trust in the deified chairman mao [who often proclaimed that he took inspiration from prior emperors] and decreased their motivation to work. some resorted to eating their own family members-> these stories, malnourished corpses, and accurate death tolls were systematically hidden by well-fed local cadres, who could face punishment for “dashing cold water on the great leap forward.”
jisheng allows that there were several (superficial) attempts by the central government to right the wrongs of unscrupulous lower-level cadres. these cadres ironically executed the central committees’ directives more harshly than the central committee itself did, but bore the brunt of the blame for mass starvation. the criticism that reached mao was limited based on officials’ desires for self preservation and safety for their families, and mao claimed to be frustrated at the dearth of truthful news he was receiving. this is despite the fact that mao proudly considered himself the chinese stalin, which intensified the rift between the soviet union and china once khrushchev took power and vilified stalin. some historians believe that this rivalry with the soviet union helped spur the great leap forward.
“knowing my life was hard at school, my father had called me home to eat the buffalo [whom he had raised] meat. as soon as i entered the house, i smelled an alluring odor. but my father ate none of the meat. he said he had been too close to the buffalo, there had been an understanding between them, and he couldn’t eat the meat. in fact, he was just making an excuse to let me eat all of it. i wolfed it down as he watched, his eyes glowing with kindness. now i wondered had he eaten that buffalo meat whether his condition might not be so desperate [jisheng watched his father die of starvation less than 3 days later].” (jisheng, 5)
this serves as a testament to the ideological brainwashing that existed in china at the time-> even after this experience, jisheng remained a part of his communist youth group. it also pulls my heartstrings, as my parents are from sichuan, the hardest hit province, and were born in 1962 and 1965. a couple months before my last grandparent died, my grandma (who had alzheimers at the time), offered every spoonful of food she ate to my mother and i before eating. in learning about how evil some left!st leaders who learned from lenin are, i have developed more empathy for my parents, who do not share my views. while i don’t think my fundamental morals or values have changed, this book in tandem with len!n the dictator have added more color as to how they can be corrupted in an imperfect world.
September 26, 2024
Without a doubt a very important book to read that dismantles a lot of the apologia around the Great Leap Forward and the famine that it caused, which claimed the lives of millions Chinese during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The author is a journalist by training, not an academic, but he used his connections and skills developed through decades of work at Xinhua to write a massive an extremely detailed tome covering in excruciating detail not only the policymaking side of the famine but its impact on everyday people. It’s an absolutely invaluable as a source to understand how central Mao’s policies to not only causing the famine but unnecessarily prolonging it for years out of misplaced millenarian Utopianism.
The book makes clear how Mao’s insistence on hairbrained policies (like planting crops too close together to increase yields) and the structural nature of a closed society (lack of access to independent sources of information making it harder for policymakers to even confirm there was a famine) created the conditions for disaster, while Mao’s use of political terror against even friends from his revolutionary days kept cadres who woke up to what was happening from doing anything about it. Horrific.
All this said, as someone who isn’t a specialized I asked around among colleagues who do specialize in modern China to ask how the book was received. Sometimes books that seem absolutely devastating are later undercut by revelations that undermine key arguments or cast doubts on the honesty of the author. Colleagues I spoke to said the book is solid, but to trust the qualitative parts while distrusting the quantitative parts. That is, the research on specific examples of the famine, internal politics at the policymaking level, and similar political and social impacts of the famine are solid. What is less solid are the estimates on deaths, with Yang’s data overshooting most estimates not only by the Chinese state itself (which obviously has incentives to lowball the figures) but serious foreign scholarship too. In this respect it sounds similar to the fair criticisms of Charles C Mann’s book 1491, on pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, which is an excellent read while also sharing the problem that he uses highball figures that significantly overshoot the region’s estimated population and subsequent demographic collapse following 1492. There may be more problems that come to light in the future but I think Yang’s book has been out long enough that if there was an absolutely devastating revelation about it, we would have found out by now.
Although worth the read, it is perhaps not a good introduction to the famine itself. The text is quite detailed and assumes a great deal of prior knowledge from readers about the historical context, so I wouldn’t recommend it to people who have yet to gain a basic grasp of 20th century Chinese history.
The author is a journalist by training, not an academic, but he used his connections and skills developed through decades of work at Xinhua to write a massive an extremely detailed tome covering in excruciating detail not only the policymaking side of the famine but its impact on everyday people. It’s an absolutely invaluable as a source to understand how central Mao’s policies to not only causing the famine but unnecessarily prolonging it for years out of misplaced millenarian Utopianism.
The book makes clear how Mao’s insistence on hairbrained policies (like planting crops too close together to increase yields) and the structural nature of a closed society (lack of access to independent sources of information making it harder for policymakers to even confirm there was a famine) created the conditions for disaster, while Mao’s use of political terror against even friends from his revolutionary days kept cadres who woke up to what was happening from doing anything about it. Horrific.
All this said, as someone who isn’t a specialized I asked around among colleagues who do specialize in modern China to ask how the book was received. Sometimes books that seem absolutely devastating are later undercut by revelations that undermine key arguments or cast doubts on the honesty of the author. Colleagues I spoke to said the book is solid, but to trust the qualitative parts while distrusting the quantitative parts. That is, the research on specific examples of the famine, internal politics at the policymaking level, and similar political and social impacts of the famine are solid. What is less solid are the estimates on deaths, with Yang’s data overshooting most estimates not only by the Chinese state itself (which obviously has incentives to lowball the figures) but serious foreign scholarship too. In this respect it sounds similar to the fair criticisms of Charles C Mann’s book 1491, on pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, which is an excellent read while also sharing the problem that he uses highball figures that significantly overshoot the region’s estimated population and subsequent demographic collapse following 1492. There may be more problems that come to light in the future but I think Yang’s book has been out long enough that if there was an absolutely devastating revelation about it, we would have found out by now.
Although worth the read, it is perhaps not a good introduction to the famine itself. The text is quite detailed and assumes a great deal of prior knowledge from readers about the historical context, so I wouldn’t recommend it to people who have yet to gain a basic grasp of 20th century Chinese history.
July 13, 2022
What a frustrating read! For an entire political party, indeed the complete leadership structure of the PRC, to behave so selfishly and brutally is unthinkable. Tombstone is a dazzlingly detailed account of the population loss (unnatural deaths and birth shortfall) of 76 million people. That number defies understanding, but Yang grounds it in reality with firsthand stories of the farmers and workers who paid the ultimate price for Mao’s hubris and savagery. Beyond the human suffering of starvation, torture, and cannibalism, I was struck by the astounding stupidity, cruelty, and cowardice of nearly every CCP cadre and leader:
“To see the masses dying, yet keep the grain locked in storerooms and refuse to distribute it; to watch the communal kitchens close down and yet not allow the masses to light stoves in their own homes; to refuse to let the masses harvest wild herbs or flee the famine; to deny canes to those crippled with starvation; to treat people worse than oxen or horses, arbitrarily beating and even killing them, lacking even a shred of human feeling - if these were not the enemy , what were they?”
I can’t imagine a more complete historical record of these horrible years.
“To see the masses dying, yet keep the grain locked in storerooms and refuse to distribute it; to watch the communal kitchens close down and yet not allow the masses to light stoves in their own homes; to refuse to let the masses harvest wild herbs or flee the famine; to deny canes to those crippled with starvation; to treat people worse than oxen or horses, arbitrarily beating and even killing them, lacking even a shred of human feeling - if these were not the enemy , what were they?”
I can’t imagine a more complete historical record of these horrible years.
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