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