Tombstone
The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
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 most powerful and important Chinese work of recent years, Yang Jisheng's Tombstone is a passionate, moving and angry account of one of the 20th century's most nightmarish events: the killing of an estimated 36 million Chinese in 1958-1961 by starvation or physical abuse. More people died in Mao's Great Famine than in the entire First World War and yet their story remains substantially untold. Now, at last, they can be heard.
Based on survivors' testimonies, this book was greeted with huge acclaim when published in Hong Kong as an essential work of reckoning.
'The man who exposed Mao's secret famine' Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the 20th century's worst catastrophes is a monument to Maoist tyranny and mismanagement, argues this hard-hitting study of China's Great Famine. Chinese journalist Yang, whose father died in the famine, compiles grim statistics he estimates that 36 million people perished and heartrending scenes of mass starvation and familial cannibalism. Even more shocking is his account of China's Great Leap Forward economic campaign, which caused the famine by pulling peasants from fields to work on ill-conceived industrial projects, melting down farming tools in backyard steel mills, and crippling agricultural productivity with collectivization schemes. Yang meticulously analyzes the delusional Communist ideology that nurtured the calamity: terrified of bearing bad news, party officials offered fantastic tales of bumper harvests to their superiors, who then exacerbated the hunger by hiking grain requisition quotas and exporting food while Mao's sycophantic personality cult prevented moderate leaders from challenging his disastrous economic experiments. This condensed English version of Yang's two-volume Chinese original suffers from disorganization; the outlines of the famine emerge only fitfully from his fragmented and repetitive accounts of its progress in individual provinces. Still, it's a harrowing read, illuminating a historic watershed that's too little known in the West. Map.
