A “Tombstone” for 36 Million
Journalist Yang Jisheng, deputy editor of the historical journal “Yanhuang Chunqiu,” has spent ten years researching the famine in China from 1958-62, which killed his father and 36 million others. The tragedy cannot be publicly discussed in China and Yang’s book is banned. The offi ...
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I saw a review of this on NPR, and immediately bought it. It came in 2 days, and I’m 3/4 through. I’m shocked, flabbergasted, angry, saddened. I knew of the Famine associated with the Great Leap Forward…back when I started paying attention to China in 1974. I accepted that it was, like many historical famines in China, due to weather, as the official word seemed to be. It has come up again and again in my contemporary readings, but I generally dismissed the anti-communist hyperbole, since those exaggerations have a political motive. But this book is definitive, extensively documented from historical Chinese sources. The nails are in the coffin for the number of 36 million. For millions, their only tombstones were the trees that were planted over their mass graves.
Now, reading the famine causation and political surroundings, I can see so much more clearly how the Cultural Revolution was also able to take hold.