Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone: Coming to terms with a father’s death and the legacy of the “Great Leap Forward”

Journalist and historian Yang Jisheng has published what many inside and outside the PRC are calling the most comprehensive and thoroughly researched account of the horrific famine that took place during the “Great Leap Forward.” The two-volume book, Tombstone 墓碑, is the result of nearly decades spent traversing China, integrating oral histories with previously unreleased Party documents, many obtained through Yang’s position as a Xinhua journalist.

Unsurprisingly, the book is banned on the mainland.

Full particulars and a well-written review can found here, but I thought I might indulge the reader with Yang’s opening:

`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.”

Anne Appelbaum writes in The Washington Post:

Like the communist legacy, the famine exists in a kind of limbo: undiscussed in public, unacknowledged by the state, yet a vivid part of popular memory. Because China is no longer a totalitarian country, merely an authoritarian one, a journalist like Yang could spend 10 years working on the history of the famine, openly soliciting interviews

Behind the scenes of a CCTV Gala

“Ann Condi” writes at Danwei about participating  in the CCTV gala Bai Nian Yuan Meng, “A One Hundred Year Dream.” Generally, speaking the author’s experience tends to confirm what I’ve always suspected in terms of the micromanagement and addled political thinking that goes into creating one of these spectacles.  Too many good parts to adequately quote, the whole piece needs to be read as a whole, but I did like this little bit which I think summarizes just how moronic CCTV can be when it comes to incorporating the ‘One World’ element into China’s ‘One Dream.’

It was interesting to see to what extent the Party officials micro-managed the details of the performance. Following the first shencha, a set of recommendations and corrections came down from the censors, including a request that we foreigners not wear the white Olympic T-shirts we had been issued, but rather come decked out in our “native dress”. (“Native dress”? What did they mean, exactly? For example, what was my Canadian friend supposed to wear? A lumberjack outfit?) None of the various mandated revisions were based upon artistic or commercial decisions on the part of television professionals, but rather on the esthetic and political whims

日历

August 2008
M T W T F S S
« Jul   Sep »
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031