[…] For nearly two decades after the 1950 Chinese takeover of Tibet, the CIA ran a covert operation designed to train Tibetan insurgents and gather intelligence about the Chinese, as part of its efforts to contain the spread of communism around the world. Though little known today, the program produced at least one spectacular intelligence coup and provided a source of support for the Dalai Lama. On the eve of Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 meeting with Mao, the program was abruptly cancelled, thus returning the US to its traditional arms-length policy toward Tibet. But this did not end the long legacy of mistrust that continues to color Chinese-American relations. Not only was the Chinese government aware of the CIA program; in 1992 it published a white paper on the subject. The paper included information drawn from reliable Western sources about the agency’s activities, but laid the primary blame for the insurgency on the “Dalai Lama clique,” a phrase Beijing still uses today.

[…] While the CIA effort never produced a mass uprising against the Chinese occupiers, it did provide one of the greatest intelligence successes of the Cold War, in the form of a vast trove of Chinese army documents captured by Tibetan fighters and turned over to the CIA in 1961. These revealed the loss of morale among Chinese soldiers, who had learned of the vast famine that was wracking China during The Great Leap Forward. Over the next decade, however, there was growing disagreement in Washington over the CIA’s activities in Tibet, and in 1971, as Henry Kissinger prepared for Nixon’s meeting with Mao, the program was wound down.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CIA, Dalai Lama, great leap forward, Henry Kissinger, intelligence, Richard Nixon, Tibet, U.S. intelligence, United States
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Have today’s 20- and 30-year-olds become the amnesic generation? Who has made them forget? By what means were they made to forget? Are we members of the older generation who still remember the past responsible for the younger generation’s amnesia?

The amnesia I’m talking about is the act of deleting memories rather than merely a natural process of forgetting. Forgetting can result from the passage of time. The act of deleting memories, however, is about actively winnowing out people’s memories of the present and the past.

In China, memory deletion is turning the younger generation into selective-memory automatons. Memories of history and the present, yesterday and today are all going through this uniform process of deletion and are being lost without trace.

I used to assume history and memory would always triumph over temporary aberrations and return to their rightful place. It now appears the opposite is true. In today’s China, amnesia trumps memory. Lies are surpassing the truth. Fabrications have become the logical link to fill historical gaps. Even memories of events that have only just taken place are being discarded at a dazzling pace, with barely intelligible fragments all that remain for people to hold on to.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accountability, famine, great leap forward, June 4th, PRC history
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Artist: BrickWeave

New Internet regulations, announced by state media in the final days of 2012, threaten to stifle the vibrant world of the Chinese netizenry. The regulations, which include required real-name registration for all Internet users, were announced in a December 18 People’s Daily editorial, which was in turn covered by CCTV’s primetime news show, News Simulcast (新闻联播 Xīnwén Liánbō). Twisting the CCTV report, BrickWeave casts disgraced politician Lei Zhengfu as the News Simulcast anchor in the mock segment “Netizens Call for Legislation to Protect Online Information.” Ordinary people have exposed corrupt officials like Lei through Weibo, forcing the authorities to do more firing and apologizing than they could have imagined before microblogging began.

Artist: Simon

“Don’t… don’t! I just want to write a weibo…” What exactly does real-name registration mean for Chinese Internet users? Officials say people will still be able to use nicknames online, but that offers little protection from identity theft. South Korea provides a sobering example of who mosts benefits from an online real-name registration system. The ninja inspectors going through this man’s pockets could be government regulators–or cyber-criminals.

Artist: Tango

Be careful what you wish for. A netizen-turned-puppet asks for a little freedom, but the very tool which could liberate him is used to control him instead.

Artist: Yuanzi

In “Getting Rich Through Hard Work” (劳动致富), ordinary men fish for their fair share–but the official, sitting on his throne at the tip of the iceberg, has cast his lines with something else in mind. The online public boiled with rage last year at the luxury watches, designer suits, and Italian cars sported by officials at all levels of the government food chain. Bo Xilai’s humble US$1600 monthly salary was apparently more than enough to send his son to Harrow and Oxford. “Watch Brother” was identified wearing at least 11 different watches in various photos. Guangzhou official Cai Bin was caught owning 21 houses, 20 more than the legal limit. The list goes on.

Artist: Fenzi

This menacing Pinocchio is not ashamed of the florid lie sprouting from his nose. Like a propaganda poster from the Great Leap Forward, it glorifies a bounty that never existed. Retired journalist Yang Jisheng has just published Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, the fruit of 20 years of research about the horrors of the Great Famine of 1960-1962. In Foreign Policy, Murong Xuecun writes that the crucial debate in China today is not how the famine happened, but whether it happened at all. He references Frank Dikötter’s landmark book Mao’s Great Famine, which estimates “‘at least’ 45 million premature deaths.” But, says Murong, “the people who spoke the truth are all dead.” Dikötter also examines the country’s collective amnesia in Foreign Policy.

Artist: Padme

What does the New Year have in store for China? Will the Party hold the country together, or will an explosive situation of its own making finally burst forth? The first controversy of 2013 has already charged ahead, as Southern Weekly’s editorial calling on China to uphold its constitution was torn to shreds by the censors. Some people like Eric X. Li may argue that the “China model” offers an alternative success story to democratization, but as China’s economy slows and middle-class discontent grows, it’s clear the whole story has yet to be told.

Browse CDT Chinese’s cartoon collection on Google+.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Drawing the News, famine, Frank Dikötter, great leap forward, history, Internet censorship, Internet regulation, lei zhengfu, Murong Xuecun, News Simulcast, official corruption, political cartoons, political humor, real name registration, Yang Jisheng
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A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village’s 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.

[…] Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability. But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.

[…] The death toll is staggering. “The most officials have admitted is 20 million,” he says, but he puts the total at 36 million. It is “equivalent to 450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki … and greater than the number of people killed in the first world war,” he writes. Many think even this is a conservative figure: in his acclaimed book Mao’s Great Famine, Frank Dikotter estimates that the toll reached at least 45 million.

At Foreign Policy, Dikötter describes the almost total absence from available archives of any photographic record of the famine:

I read through thousands of documents: secret reports from the Public Security Bureaus, detailed minutes of top party meetings, investigations into cases of mass murder, inquiries compiled by special teams tasked with determining the extent of the catastrophe, secret opinion surveys, and letters of complaint written by ordinary citizens. Some were neatly written in longhand, others typed out on flimsy, yellowing paper. Some were excruciating to read, for instance, a report written by an investigation team noting the case of a boy in a Hunan village who had been caught stealing a handful of grain. A local Communist Party cadre forced his father to bury the boy alive. The father died of grief a few days later.

[…] For four years, I studied Mao’s famine, and only once have I seen a visual illustration of its awfulness. In 2009, I visited a historian in a drab concrete building in the suburbs of Beijing. He, too, had been working on the history of the Great Leap Forward, burrowing in archives for more than a decade and obsessively documenting the starvation that had decimated the region of his birth, a county barely 100 miles north of Mao’s hometown in Hunan. Stacks of photocopied archival material bulged out of filing cabinets in his sparse office. I asked him whether he had ever seen a photograph of the famine. He frowned and reluctantly pulled out a folder with a reproduction of the only picture he had discovered. It came from the files of the party committee in his home county and was from a police investigation into a case of cannibalism. The small, fading picture showed a young man standing against a brick wall, peering straight into the camera, seemingly emotionless. By his feet stood a large pot containing the parts of a young boy, his head and limbs severed from his body.

Another visual record of the period has survived, however. A slideshow of Great Leap Forward-era propaganda posters at Foreign Policy shows smiling farmers and bumper harvests. These images helped preserve the illusion that Yang Jisheng himself laboured under for many years: that starvation was local, and deaths were isolated tragedies, rather than part of a wider catastrophe of the government’s making.

Foreign Policy also hosts an article, translated by Martin Merz, in which Murong Xuecun angrily discusses present day arguments over the causes, extent and reality of the famine, and the government’s continued efforts to control the narrative. He writes scathingly about Chinese youth’s supposedly unquestioning acceptance of official information, and blames the Party’s stifling influence for this, the polarised recent debate over the famine, and other evils (“in which case he’s in for a nasty shock if he ever leaves China“, as Jamie K commented at Blood and Treasure).

For some 40 years, official publications in China have called the Great Famine of 1959-1962 “the three years of natural disasters.” But no one seems to know exactly what these disasters were: Floods? Drought? Earthquakes? Landslides? Hail storms or locust plagues? No one has the answer, and no one is brave enough to stand up and demand an answer from the government — because the official pronouncement of “natural disaster” is sufficiently intimidating to close all mouths.

Motivated by the desire to be “responsible to history and the truth,” a phrase churned out ad nauseam in China’s mass media, official accounts over the last 10 years have become more circumspect, employing the more neutral term “the three years of difficulties,” which seems to cover both the natural and manmade. This approach obviates the need to examine contributing factors and that Mao and other leaders caused the famine.

[…] The memories of those who experienced the famine are fading away. The current generation, like their parents, were force-fed state CCTV newscasts and party mouthpiece People’s Daily reports, but also fattened to the point of obesity with Coca-Cola and hamburgers. Of course they now find it difficult to imagine that people once starved to death. And so they ask: If they didn’t have rice, why didn’t they eat meat?

While stories of the disaster may seem far-fetched to the young, older generations’ memories of the famine might actually be fuelling China’s ballooning childhood obesity problem. From Debra Bruno at The Washington Post:

Although the era of famine is long past, many grandparents and parents still push their children to eat a lot.

Setsuko Hosoda, a family doctor at Beijing United Family Hospital, says the parents and grandparents she sees are “always worried that their child is not eating enough.” A 2012 Penn State study of 176 Chinese children ages 6 to 18 found that 72 percent of mothers of overweight children thought their children were normal or underweight.

Sissi Zhong, a 26-year-old Beijing secretary, recalls that her grandparents got angry if she left food on her plate when she was a child. “They said, ‘Do you know, in my time of food shortages, people didn’t have food, so how can you waste your food?’ ” Zhong says. So she cleaned her plate even if she was very full.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, famine, great leap forward, historical record, history, Murong Xuecun, obesity, photography, propaganda posters, Yang Jisheng
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Having lost the ability to speak the truth, we will tell many lies. What’s even more frightening is that in addition to lies we have invented a new kind of speech: ghost-talk. Lies are just meant to deceive others: our village produces 20,000 jin per acre. But ghost-talk is meant to hurt, to consume: all our country’s villages must produce 20,000 jin per acre. Anyone who doesn’t comply will be killed, no matter what their rank. When speaking the truth will cost you your life, no one is willing to speak the truth. When telling a lie was rewarded with promotions and wealth, this country became the Kingdom of Lies. This process continues uninterrupted to this very day, and it hasn’t yet reached completion. For example, our railways are the fastest in the world, then accidents happen, or “the Chinese people’s restoration is 62% complete,” and then we discover more than 62% of officials are corrupt….to give you another example, if you want to speak a little truth, there will be a group of people who come out of the woodwork and say, “What makes you qualified to say that so many people died during the Great Famine? Did someone in your family die? Did you see Lin Shao tortured with your own eyes? Were you there at that very moment? If you weren’t there, stop spreading rumors.” They seem to not believe that there is a such thing as records in this world, or documentaries, or people who have testified to these events. According to their logic, Jews could not have died in gas chambers at the hands of Nazis, because you didn’t see it with your own eyes. They can’t even prove they are their parents’ children, because they didn’t see it with their own eyes.

Li has written frequently about the concept of lies and truth-telling in China, notably in relation to natural and manmade disasters such as the collapse of a bridge in Harbin:

…The greatest truth in this place is that we know they are lying, and they know that we know they are lying, and we also know that they actually know that we know that they are lying…so we don’t care about the truth anymore, we just care about the way they put on their show of “truth,” and only the complete compilation of all of these performances is enough to count as the whole truth.

Read more by and about Li Chengpeng via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accountability, famine, great leap forward, Li Chengpeng, truth
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As an adult, Yang used his credentials as a reporter for the state Xinhua news agency to cajole and beg his way into provincial archives. He started gathering information on the famine in the mid-90s, and began the project in earnest in 1998.

He worked undercover for a decade at immense personal risk, pretending to research official grain and rural policies, in order to put together the first detailed account of the great famine from Chinese government sources.

From his research, Yang estimates that 36 million died during the famine. Most deaths were caused by starvation, but the figure also includes killing during ideological campaigns. Some Western scholars have put the toll as high as 45 million.

Unbearable hunger made people behave in inhuman ways. Even government records reported cases where people ate human flesh from dead bodies.

In the New York Times, Yang explains his motivation for taking the risk of publishing the book:

As a journalist and a scholar of contemporary history, I felt a duty to find out how the Great Famine happened and why. Starting in the 1990s, I visited more than a dozen provinces, interviewed over a hundred witnesses, and collected thousands of documents. Since the Great Famine was a forbidden topic, I could get access to archives only under the pretext of “researching agricultural policies” or “studying the food issue.”

Communist leaders established a vast system of slavery in the name of liberating mankind. It was promoted as the “road to paradise,” but in fact it was a road to perdition.

I intended my book to be a memorial to the 36 million victims, but also a literal tombstone, anticipating the ultimate demise of the totalitarian political system that caused the Great Famine. I was mindful of the risks in this endeavor: if something happens to me because I tried to preserve a truthful memory, then let the book stand as my tombstone, too.

Read an excerpt of “Tombstone” via NPR. See also a review of the book by Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books, as well as more about Yang Jisheng and the Great Leap Forward, via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accountability, famine, great leap forward, PRC history, transparency, Yang Jisheng
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Yang’s travails in piecing together the book are part of its lore. As a reporter for the government’s Xinhua news agency, he had been a blindly loyal Party member. The turning point was the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: “The blood of those young students cleansed my brain of all the lies I had accepted over the previous decades.” That made him determined to write the history of the Great Famine, which had touched him directly: he had watched his father die in front of him, at the time thinking it was an isolated tragedy and only later realizing that tens of millions had also died.

[…] His main point is to prove that the Party, from the village chief up to Chairman Mao, knew exactly what was going on but was too warped by ideology to change course until tens of millions had died. Like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the book is a cry of outrage from a victim. Yang vowed to erect for his father an everlasting tombstone, one that would not crumble or fall with time, and he did so with this book.

[… E]arlier this year a national newspaper ran a multipage supplement on the famine—an unprecedented recognition of this disaster. When I asked an editor at a leading Party newspaper why this was, he had a one-word answer: “Tombstone.”

It would be simplistic to say Tombstone alone has set off this rethinking of Chinese history. Instead, like any great book it is part of something bigger, in this case a desire by many Chinese people to reconsider their society’s future by clarifying its past.

See also Michael Fathers’ review at The Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Popoff’s at The Boston Globe, and more on Yang Jisheng and the Great Leap Forward via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese history, famine, great leap forward, Henan, Mao Zedong, PRC history, Xinyang, Yang Jisheng
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For the general reader, “Mao’s Great Famine” is unlikely to be bettered. “Tombstone” is something quite different, a condensed, yet magisterial 600-page edition of a densely detailed, two-volume Chinese-language account by Yang Jisheng, a retired Chinese journalist and Communist Party member.

[...] As a teenager in 1959, Mr. Yang watched his father die of starvation. Years later, while working in a senior editorial post at Xinhua, China’s state-controlled news agency, he began his own search for the truth behind the famine. The author spent 20 years tracking down survivors across China and using his authority as a respected Communist cadre to access provincial archives. It was, in part, expiation for his shame in not questioning his father’s death.

[...] Mr. Yang concludes that Mao Zedong knew early on that his policies of extracting extortionate levels of foodstuffs from an impoverished countryside were killing millions. He uncovers the “arrest plans” and the quotas given to the police and militia for each province in dealing with those accused of speaking out against the Great Leap Forward and the regime. It was as if the quotas were political production targets. In 1958 Anhui province, a center of the famine, was given an “arrest quota” from the central government of 45,000 people. Officials surpassed the quota with 101,000 arrests. Many of those arrested died of starvation in labor camps.

See more on Yang Jisheng and the Great Leap Forward via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese history, famine, great leap forward, PRC history, Yang Jisheng
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NoVforMe: Call for Proof: This is Too Crazy–Pierre Haski, a reporter formerly based in Beijing for the French newspaper Libération, interviewed Mo Yan in 2004. During the interview, Mo Yan said that he is the child of a farmer. During the Great Leap Forward and Great Famine, he ate charcoal to keep from starving. He thanks the military and is still a Communist Party member–even though he’s lost his faith in the Party. When the reporter asked him when he lost his faith, he replied that from that year onward, he only retained his Party membership to avoid bringing on unnecessary trouble.

本人无V： 【求证：这个太猛了】法国解放报前驻京记者哈斯基04年走访了莫言 ，莫言在访谈中表示，他是一个农民的孩子，大跃进、大饥荒曾因饥饿难忍而吞食炭灰。他感谢军队，他依然是党员，尽管对党已经失去信心，记者询问何时失去信 心，莫言回答从那一年开始，他之所以继续保留党员证，是不想增添不必要的麻烦。

So far, the post has been commented on and reposted over 1550 times and remains untouched by both the author and the censors. Some have replied that @NoVforMe, and the public at large, should leave Mo Yan alone, while others redouble the call for verification of the interview. Still others are struck by the novelist’s courage and humanity, working within the Party system but not supporting it blindly. Indeed, many ordinary Chinese join the Party as a prerequisite to job promotion and for other non-political purposes. Party membership often has very little to do with an individual’s beliefs.

Some readers hang on Mo Yan’s mention of “that year,” a likely reference to 1989, the year of the Tiananmen protests. “That year” was blocked from Sina Weibo search results around the anniversary of the military crackdown this summer.

The following comments were selected by the CDT Chinese editors:

ZEDDD: He sure has the courage to speak.

ZEDDD：真敢说。

charlesxue: I want proof.

薛蛮子: 求证实

Hanjianggouxue: I just heard the same on Radio France Internationale.

寒江钓雪0529：刚也在法广上听到了

esrv: Even if this was proven true, what would you do about it?
esrv：就算证实了，你们又能怎样？

MrKeke: Don’t try to bring out all his dirty laundry just because he won a Nobel Prize. Let him be. Let us enjoy his work.

可可先生：得个诺奖，不要什么都掏出来吧。饶了莫言，让我们欣赏他的作品。

FattyCat: Go ahead and demand proof for this. This comes from a Pierre Haski interview. http://t.cn/zllX3De [link to Rue 89 article, in French]

猫大胖子：来，拿去求证吧。这来源于一个Pierre Haski的采访。http://t.cn/zllX3De

xiniuwangyue: Stop trying to take him down. What is there to prove?

夕牛望月V：别再害人家了，证实什么啊

hasange: You want proof for this thing? Isn’t this just someone speaking honestly?

哈三哥：这东西还要证实吗，这不是大实话吗？

chuguofuxing: Any normal person would say and do the same!

楚国复兴：是个正常的人都会这么说，这么做！

OceanBottomFish110: Even if he did say this, you can’t just bring it up to hurt the guy.

海底的鱼110：即使说过，也不能再提起而害人家了

shluyanling: Which year is that year?

鲁燕玲：那一年是指哪一年？

yogen: It’s definitely 1989.
国际游民林丹–致力室内环境净化：肯定是89年了

IndependentScholar2010: That year, the shadow of a “tractor.”
独立学者2010: 那一年，拖拉机的影子。

kingleiou: That year…
大藏布：那一年……

Wuhezizon: I feel the same way. @Dacangbu: That year…
乌合zizon：同感。//@大藏布: 那一年……

LoneWalker: It started from that year. That year was probably the most hopeless year of them all.
孤独漫步人：从那一年开始。那应该是最让人绝望的一年。

Limingqianye: China’s youngest, most courageous generation was trampled under the wheels of authoritarianism–history written in blood.
-黎明前夜：中国最年轻最勇敢的一代人倒在了专制的车轮下，血写的历史。

OldCowNight: With regards to the tragedy of ’89, I believe, anyone with a bit of a conscience would be like this. It’s nothing to boast about. That day, one of my teachers jotted down these four lines. They shake me to my core: “A night of thunderous turmoil. All were singing and dancing their praises. No one will speak of this again. Even the birds on the eaves make no sound.”
老牛之友: 89之难，我相信，任何稍有点良心良知的，均此，不值得夸耀。我一位老师，当日早上就写下四句，这才叫入骨的厉害：一夕雷霆勘动乱，万家歌舞颂英明。从此莫谈天下事，檐前鸦雀亦无声。

FieldHeart: Now I know why they gave him a Nobel Prize…
FieldHeart：终于明白为什么诺贝尔奖给他了。。。

IamWangFeiFeizhuliu: I never thought Old Mo and I would have the same awareness. But my feelings about this are particularly strong this year.
我是王妃非主流：没想到我跟老莫有着同样的觉悟，不过我这想法今年特别强烈

KneelLong: Chinese-style survival philosophy…
跪久了：中国式生存哲学……

baizhenxia: Authoritarian monarchs love smart elites who don’t cause any trouble!
尊严之子：这样聪明的不添麻烦的精英是每一个专制的君主都喜欢的人！

Xishanqingyu: Does this mean he has a conscience, or that he doesn’t have a conscience?
西山晴雨：他这是有良心呢？还是没良心呢？

PoisonTongue: Oh, so he’s talking about “that year”! Haha! That sensitive year!
毒舌列文 ：哦，原来是“那一年”啊，哈哈！敏感词的“那一年”！

FatLittleSoldier2012: Haha! Let’s all work hard to force Nobel Prize winners get out or go in.
胖胖小兵2012：哈哈，大家努力把大陆诺奖得主不是弄出去，就是弄进去

junjunq: That day during the press conference, whether it was intentional or not, Mo Yan conveyed a sense of his dissatisfaction with and disapproval of the Chinese Communist Party.
JunjunQian–大爱清尘：那天的新闻发布会上莫言其实也有意无意表达这个意思，对gcd的执政不满意，不认同

WuShen: No matter if this news is real or not, anyone who lived through that time period would have lost their faith in everything. And that’s for certain.
Wu申：无论真假，谁经历那样的年代，无论对什么都会失去信心，这是肯定的。

Jingxiguqiao: Mo Yan is probably very conflicted inside. To live within the system, he must compromise his writing.
荆溪孤樵：莫言内心应该很矛盾，要在体制内生活写作必须妥协

TianmahangkongV88: How many other Party members raise their right hands as they take the oath and don’t think it counts?
天马行空V88：还有多少高举右手，捏着拳头宣誓不算数的在党内的人？

JiafeimaoBrother: Now this guy is what I call smart!
加肥猫大哥：他才是聪明人~~

OceanStone1981: Mo Yan wins a prize, and now everything is being dug up. Sigh. It’s tough to become famous in China–even dangerous.
海石1981：莫言获个奖，什么都被挖出来了，唉，在中国出名难，出名还危险

DanGirl61: I believe Mo Yan would say something like this. You can feel the weight of the Chinese people by reading his work.
丹娘61：我相信莫言会说这样的话，从他的作品中能读出中国人的沉重..

USAPrincePerv: Telling it like it is…
USA君子好色：实话实说 、、、

InteriorDesigner: Disaster comes from the mouth, Mo Yan!
装饰装修设计师：祸从口出啊，莫言！

Feichi: If it’s true, it would make people really admire him. On the one hand, he has thoughts like these. On the other, he was able to become the vice chairman of the China Writers’ Association.
廢癡：如果是真的，確實很讓人佩服啊，一方面有這樣的想法，一方面還爬到作協副主席的位置。

FeisiLi: Now I understand that Mo Yan is sick at heart. His name is attributed to all kinds of ideologies and philosophies. That has to be overwhelming. Who knows if one day while he’s asleep he’ll get shot. Show a little caring. Give him some love, and stop tormenting him.
菲斯李：我现在理解莫言的忧心忡忡了，各种思想观点都打着他的名号，让他不堪重负，说不定躺着哪天也被中枪了。保留一点爱心，给他一份关爱，别折腾他了。

GCDCoronationDay: Not wanting to create unnecessary trouble–there are many people who think the same way.
GCD登基纪念日：不想增加不必要的麻烦，也是很多人的想法。

TianmaxingkongV88: So the oath he took under the Party flag doesn’t count?
天马行空V88：在党旗下宣誓不算数？

Huajiuduoduo: You have to swear an oath to enter the Party. But if you wish to leave, it’s not that easy. Especially when your children enter school and look for work, you’re finished.
花酒多多V：入档都是需要赌咒发誓的，要是敢退档，可不是株连九族那么简单的事情，最现实的是在子女入学就业等方面有你好果子吃

EyeOfChild: If this is true, he’s nothing but an opportunist!
童眼稚翁：如果这是真的，那么他就是一个投机分子！

NoHKinHeart: I don’t care about this. The important thing is that he won an award.
心中无股HK：这个别太在意。重在的是他获奖了。

minchaow: It’s not everyday that a Chinese person wins a Nobel Prize. Whatever you do, don’t stop him from going to accept it.
天城云扬：咱中国出个诺奖获奖的不容易，千万别让他去领不了奖。

TianjinLiuTong: It makes sense, not wanting to add unnecessary trouble.
天津刘彤：这个说法靠谱，不想增添不必要的麻烦。

an4001_5lb: When will we be able to remove our masks and speak the truth?
an4001_5lb：什么时候可以摘掉面具公开说实话？

Translation by Little Bluegill.

“Netizen Voices” is an original CDT series. If you would like to reuse this content, please follow the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 agreement.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989, 1989 protests, gao xingjian, great leap forward, literature, Liu Xiaobo, mo yan, Netizen Voices, Nobel Prize, Tiananmen
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In Qiaotou district, in Sichuan Province, “An old lady named Luo Wenxiu was the first to start consuming human flesh,” investigators wrote. “After an entire family of seven had died, Luo dug up the body of the 3-year-old girl, Ma Fahui. She sliced up the girl’s flesh and spiced it with chili peppers before steaming and eating it.” The report, dated Feb. 9 of that year, is one of more than 100 astonishing documents collected by the historian Zhou Xun in a new book about Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, published by Yale University Press.

[…] Ms. Zhou and a growing number of Chinese — and some Western — scholars believe the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s campaign of breakneck industrialization and agricultural collectivization, resulted in the deaths of perhaps 45 million people, mostly in the countryside. People died from a combination of starvation, overwork and violence in the quest for a perfect Communist society.

[…] To document that, Ms. Zhou spent four years, starting in 2006, visiting dozens of county and provincial archives, some under military guard. Access was easier during the first two years of her research, a legacy, she believes, of the rule of former President Jiang Zemin. Still, she often gained access only through informal contacts, she said, declining to be more specific. In all, she photocopied, photographed or transcribed about 1,000 documents. (Ms. Zhou also conducted more than 100 interviews with survivors, to be published by Yale in a separate book.)

Besides the appalling scale of deaths, Ms. Zhou believes that another legacy of the famine is the long-lasting impact it had on the spirit of Chinese society. Also from Didi Kirsten Tatlow at The New York Times:

“I do believe it created a kind of long-lasting impact in the sense that, O.K., human beings are selfish, you can say that in general. But the use of violence, it really reached its height during the famine period and I believe that was the background behind the Cultural Revolution” that began just four years later, in 1966, killing many more.

Hopelessness and selfishness inform Chinese society to this day, she said.

“I very much feel that coming from this, what people have in China is a sense of hopelessness,” she said. “That to survive, the only way is to do it yourself.”

Unable to look to the state to provide a safe environment, “you take things for yourself. It’s the only possible means to survive,” she said.

For more coverage of the Great Famine, see The Great Leap From Myth to History, via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Chinese history, famine, food, great leap forward, Jiang Zemin, PRC history
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The team documented the tragedy in Sichuan in detail, but by the time they submitted the report the political winds had shifted back in Mao’s favor. The report was spiked and as of today the only evidence of its existence is the manuscript copy of his section of the report retained by Xiao Feng, who is now 93 years old. It confirms the death toll of 12 million – 17% of the province’s total population.

For his pains, Liao was the target of a vendetta by the Sichuan provincial government. He was accused of participating in an anti-party clique and spent the next two decades in various labor and detention facilities until he was completely rehabilitated in 1982. Punning on the slogan, “A year (of great leap) is equivalent to 20 years (of ordinary development)”, Liao quipped that “3 hours (of reporting to Yang on the Great Leap Forward) worked out to 20 years (of incarceration).”

Lee’s piece also mentions this Global Times article from May, in which the English-language “voice of combative nationalism” also helps to debunk some of the national myths about “natural disasters” between 1959 and 1961, and mentions the desire to accurately document this period while its graying survivors are still around:

According to the History of the Communist Party of China, during the Great Leap Forward, iron and steel production was identified as a key requirement for economic advancement, and many farmers were ordered away from agricultural work to join the iron production workforce. The production of agriculture and light industry production dropped sharply.

In 1959, China also experienced the most severe drought in its recent history, the book said. It claims that combined with foreign affairs, especially the deteriorating relationship with the Soviet Union, food shortages became serious.

Yang Jisheng, a journalist and author, wrote in his book Tombstone that the famine could fully be blamed on political errors. According to experts from the China Meteorological Administration, no severe weather calamities occurred between 1958 and 1962, he wrote.

Also see prior CDT coverage of the Great Leap Forward and projects to historically document it.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, Chinese history, famine, Global Times, great leap forward, Southern People Weekly
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Armed with video cameras, Mr Wu’s researchers have already travelled to 50 villages in 10 provinces across China.

So far they have collected more than 600 memories from the famine, the result of a disastrous political campaign launched by Mao Zedong.

The Great Leap Forward was supposed to propel China into a new age of communism and plenty – but it failed spectacularly.

Agriculture was disrupted as private property was abolished and people were forced into supposedly self-sufficient communes.

Interviews for this new project reveal that even though the famine happened a long time ago – between late 1958 and 1962 – memories are still sharp.

Read more about the Great Leap Forward via CDT, including efforts by Chinese historian Yang Jisheng and Dutch historian Frank Dikötter to document this period of history.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: famine, great leap forward, Mao Zedong, PRC history
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Mao Yushi, an 82-year-old economist, penned a blog entry that was strongly critical of Mao, suggesting he should be held responsible for the deaths of 50 million Chinese citizens during the 1960s. The economist also noted his reputation as a womanizer who made decisions for his own benefit, rather than for the greater good of China’s development.

Unsurprisingly, the entry captured the attention of the media, academics, senior government officials and ordinary citizens. But when I tried to access the original entry, I found it had already been removed (although it can still be found on the Internet, having been copied and posted elsewhere before the authorities could delete the original).

Mao Yushi already isn’t well-liked by the Chinese authorities. This is partly because he has participated in a number of political activities that have upset the government, including signing a petition in support of detained activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Sources have told me that Mao’s phones are tapped, including the one he uses for media interviews. His family, meanwhile, say they have been receiving death threats.

There’s clearly no chance the authorities will allow Mao Yushi’s article to be published. First and foremost, such criticism of Mao Zedong is tantamount to dismissing the Chinese Communist Party itself, and the historical foundation on which it survives. A second reason it won’t be published is that the government fears that openly tackling such a sensitive subject risks prompting a chain reaction of events that could spark instability.

China Media Project translated and provided background on Mao Yushi’s essay.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCP history, Cultural Revolution, great leap forward, Mao Yushi, Mao Zedong
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A recent essay by the liberal economist Mao Yushi, “Returning Mao Zedong to his Original Person,” has highlighted the controversy.

Mr. Mao, who is no relation to Mao Zedong, accused the former leader of hypocrisy and unusual cruelty.

The Cultural Revolution was merely a ploy to destroy his many critics after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward famine, which killed around 30 million people, Mr. Mao wrote.

Evidence of cruelty is found, for example, in Mao’s indifference to the fate of friends he drove to suicide, wrote the economist, and that of President Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao first attacked, then pretended to save, only to have Mr. Liu expelled from the party on his 70th birthday, before dying, untended, in jail in 1969.

A document circulating online purporting to detail a proposal by top Communist Party officials to remove Mao Zedong Thought from party work, documents and policies, has also sharpened debate.

The supposed Politburo document, No. 179, dated Dec. 28, 2010, is said to have been proposed by Xi Jinping, the man expected to become China’s next president, and Wu Bangguo, the head of the National People’s Congress.

Even if a hoax — the internal workings of the Politburo are almost entirely opaque, and it is almost impossible to verify its authenticity — the document has refocused attention on the issue of Mao’s legacy among commentators and party officials.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Bin Laden, CCP history, Cultural Revolution, great leap forward, Liu Shaoqi, Mao Yushi, Mao Zedong, political reform, Wen Yunchao, Wu Bangguo, Xi Jinping
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“What is deeply imprinted on my mind is: on the smokingly dried land the slim and weak child carried heavy firewood; the zigzag footprints left in the cold wind and the blind nights; the sound of smashing furniture and people begging for mercy; the cat being hanged till it was dead and mudfish heads reaching out from the pond; the bullying and cursing in front of people. We were so young but we had to bear all the crimes,” Ai wrote in 1978.

“If I can say I have some valuable things, those are my memories. Memories of the endless muddy road, the wild Gobi Desert without any sign of people. The bottomless memory poisoned our young souls like snakes, but we didn’t die in it. On the contrary, I want a better life for myself to control my own destiny.”

Ms Gao said her brother was not an activist but “an artist only” expressing his sympathy for the people living at the bottom levels of societies not only in Beijing but also in New York when he was there.

“Weiwei is doomed to be ‘exposed’ as a public enemy of unforgivable sins. (People) will know that when they look back at the ‘crimes’ of his father in 1958 and 1966,” Ms Gao said.

“We’re fully aware the authorities will not easily let him go, they must work out more crimes beyond the ‘economic crimes’ .”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention 2011, Cultural Revolution, great leap forward, PRC history
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