Book 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
Yang Jisheng was born in 1940. He worked for many years at Xinhua
News Agency, until his retirement in 2001. From the early 1990s onwards
Yang interviewed survivors and collected records of the Great Famine
(1959-61), eventually accumulating some 10 million words of testimony.
This was published in Chinese originally in two volumes (the
English-language edition is edited down) and has been widely acclaimed
as the book that not only preserved many extraordinary and terrible
stories but also broke a widespread official silence on the subject.
Tombstone
remains banned in China.
