Book reviews - ‘Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962,’ by Yang Jisheng
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 - by Yang
Jisheng
Reviewed by Jonathan
Mirsky
'I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my father who died of starvation in 1959, for the thirty-six million Chinese who also starved to death, for the system that brought about their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book.' : Yang Jisheng
In the summer of 1962, China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, warned
Mao Zedong that “history will record the role you and I played in the
starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!”
Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao’s, where almost a
million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or
had killed and eaten their comrades. In “Tombstone,” an eye-opening study of
the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese
starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others
failed to be born, which means that “China’s total population loss during the
Great Famine then comes to 76 million.”
There are good earlier studies of the famine and one excellent
recent one, “Mao’s Great Famine” by Frank Dikötter, but Yang’s is significant
because he lives in China and is boldly unsparing. Mao’s rule, he writes,
“became a secular theocracy. . . . Divergence from Mao’s views was heresy. . .
. Dread and falsehood were thus both the result and the lifeblood of
totalitarianism.” This political system, he argues, “caused the degeneration of
the national character of the Chinese people.”
Yang, who was born in 1940, is a well-known veteran
journalist and a Communist Party member. Before I quote the following sentence,
remember that a huge portrait of Chairman Mao still hangs over the main gate
into Beijing’s Forbidden City and can be seen from every corner of Tiananmen
Square, where his embalmed body lies in an elaborate mausoleum. Despite this
continued public veneration, Yang looks squarely at the real chairman: “In
power, Mao became immersed in China’s traditional monarchical culture and Lenin
and Stalin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ . . . When Mao was provided with
a list of slogans for his approval, he personally added one: ‘Long Live
Chairman Mao.’ ” Two years ago, in an interview with the journalist Ian
Johnson, Yang remarked that he views the famine “as part of the totalitarian
system that China had at the time. The chief culprit was Mao.”
From the early 1990s, Yang writes, he began combing normally
closed official archives containing confidential reports of the ravages of the
famine, and reading accounts of the official killing of protesters. He found
references to cannibalism and interviewed men and women who survived by eating
human flesh. Chinese statistics are always overwhelming, so Yang helps us
to conceptualize what 36 million deaths actually means. It is, he writes, “450
times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki” and
“greater than the number of people killed in World War I.” It also, he insists,
“outstripped the ravages of World War II.” While 40 to 50 million died in that
war, it stretched over seven or eight years, while most deaths in the great
Chinese famine, he notes, were “concentrated in a six-month period.” The famine
occurred neither during a war nor in a period of natural calamity. When
mentioned in China, which is rarely, bad weather or Russian treachery are usually
blamed for this disaster, and both are knowledgeably dismissed by Yang.
The most staggering and detailed chapter in Yang’s narrative
relates what happened in Xinyang Prefecture, in Henan Province. A lush region,
it was “the economic engine of the province,” with a population in 1958 of 8.5
million. Mao’s policies had driven the peasants from their individual small
holdings; working communally, they were now forced to yield almost everything
to the state, either to feed the cities or — crazily — to increase exports. The
peasants were allotted enough grain for just a few months. In Xinyang alone,
Yang calculates, over a million people died.
Mao had pronounced that the family, in the new order of
collective farming and eating, was no longer necessary. Liu Shaoqi, reliably
sycophantic, agreed: “The family is a historically produced phenomenon and will
be eliminated.” Grain production plummeted, the communal kitchens collapsed. As
yields dived, Zhou Enlai and other leaders, “the falcons and hounds of evil,” as
Yang describes them, assured Mao that agricultural production had in fact
soared. Mao himself proclaimed that under the new dispensation yields could be
exponentially higher. “Tell the peasants to resume eating chaff and herbs for
half the year,” he said, “and after some hardship for one or two or three years
things will turn around.”
A journalist reporting on Xinyang at the time saw the
desperation of ordinary people. Years later, he told Yang that he had witnessed
a Party secretary — during the famine, cadres were well fed — treating his
guests to a local delicacy. But he knew what happened to people who recorded
the truth, so he said nothing: “How could I dare to write an internal reference
report?” Indeed. Liu Shaoqi confronted Mao, who remembered all slights, and
during the Cultural Revolution he was accused of being a traitor and an enemy
agent. Expelled from the Party, he died alone, uncared for, anonymous.
Of course, “Tombstone” has been banned in China, but in 2008
it was published in Hong Kong in two mighty volumes. Pirated texts and Internet
summaries soon slipped over the border. This English version, although
substantial, is roughly half the size of the original. Its eloquent
translators, Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian, say their aim, like the author’s, is to
“present the tragedy in all its horror” and to render Yang’s searching analysis
in a manner that is both accessible to general readers and informative for
specialists. There is much in this readable “Tombstone” I needed to know.
Yang writes that one reason for the book’s title is to
establish a memorial for the uncle who raised him like a son and starved to
death in 1959. At the time a devout believer in the Party and ignorant of the
extent of what was going on in the country at large, Yang felt that everything,
no matter how difficult, was part of China’s battle for a new socialist order.
Discovering official secrets during his work as a young journalist, he began to
lose his faith. His real “awakening,” however, came after the 1989 Tiananmen
massacre: “The blood of those young students cleansed my brain of all the lies
I had accepted over the previous decades.” This is brave talk. Words and
phrases associated with “Tiananmen” remain blocked on China’s Internet.
Nowadays, Yang asserts, “rulers and ordinary citizens alike
know in their hearts that the totalitarian system has reached its end.” He
hopes “Tombstone” will help banish the “historical amnesia imposed by those in
power” and spur his countrymen to “renounce man-made calamity, darkness and
evil.” While guardedly hopeful about the rise of democracy, Yang is ultimately
a realist. Despite China’s economic and social transformation, this courageous
man concludes, “the political system remains unchanged.” “Tombstone” doesn’t
directly challenge China’s current regime, nor is its author part of an
organized movement. And so, unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo,
Yang Jisheng is not serving a long prison sentence. But he has driven a stake
through the hearts of Mao Zedong and the party he helped found.
The history of the Great Leap Forward," one of my
teaching colleagues used to begin a lecture, "is the history of Chinese
accountancy." The lack of excitement on his students' faces was palpable,
but his less than enticing opening does sum up this bizarre and desolate period
in modern Chinese history. For with its tales of exaggerated grain production
and ever-more fanciful industrial targets, the Leap was indeed a demonstration
of how dubious statistics and lack of transparency could culminate in the
deaths of millions.
In 1958, China was a state still nervous about its place in
the world – isolated from the capitalist countries and with its USSR alliance
starting to fray. Mao Zedong pushed hard for a new programme that would boost China's
economy at a stroke. His colleagues supported him in a drive that would become
known as the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to increase agricultural and
industrial production to levels never before seen in human history. Within a
year, however, it became clear that the plans were going horribly wrong. In
China's countryside, food became ever scarcer. Hugely exaggerated reports of
grain harvests were taken seriously at high levels, and food was moved from the
countryside to the cities while millions of farmers started to die of
starvation and its associated diseases. The death toll has never been fully
calculated, but Frank Dikötter's powerful Mao's Great Famine puts
the number of dead at some 45 million between 1958 and 1962. The picture that
Dikötter draws is devastating; but do we really need another long and detailed
book on the famine?
The answer is yes. Tombstone is not just a
history but a political sensation. Its author, Yang Jisheng, was
a longstanding journalist at China's Xinhua news agency. His own father died of
starvation in 1959, and the "tombstone" of the title is in part a
tribute to a dead parent who was never acknowledged as a victim of the state's
policies. Over the years, Yang used his access to collect materials from
restricted archives detailing the famine. He was denied permission to publish
on the mainland, but the book came out in Hong Kong in 2008 and went into eight
reprints. This translation is an adapted version of the two-volume Chinese
original. The editors and translators, Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian, have done a
skilful job in reducing and recasting the book so that its chapters alternate
between an examination of high politics and the details of the famine on the
ground.
What Yang found is worth knowing. One of the most devastated
provinces was Henan, in central China. Henan had known famine before; the
province was at the centre of the horrific hunger that struck during the second
world war in 1942-43, killing some 3 to 4 million people. The policies of the
Great Leap led to a new desolation in the province. Reports uncovered by Yang
make evident a cycle of starvation and violence: a file from 1959 tells of one
farmer who was "harshly beaten" because a small piece of beef was
found in his home; he died six days later. A woman who was found cooking grain
was "subjected to group struggle" for stealing; bound up and soaked
in cold water, she too died shortly afterwards.
For a while, it was possible to think that the leadership
had not understood the full level of the catastrophe in the countryside. The
shattering of such illusions came at the Lushan conference of 1959. Peng
Dehuai, one of the great marshals of the Chinese civil war against the
nationalists, was a strong supporter of the Leap. But the discovery that people
from his own home area were starving to death prompted him to write to Mao to
ask for the policies to be adapted. Mao was furious, reading the letter out in
public and demanding that his colleagues in the leadership line up either
behind him or Peng. Almost to a man, they supported Mao, with his security
chief Kang Sheng declaring of the letter: "I make bold to
suggest that this cannot be handled with lenience." Peng was sent off into
political obscurity. While there were minor adjustments to the Leap policies,
the fundamental flaws were not addressed, and millions more continued to die
until the formal abandonment of the programme in 1962.
Yang's book is rich with details and statistics, but his is
not an academic treatment. In its intent, it has been compared with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag
Archipelago. The comparison is not quite apt: although the book is
banned in China, Yang has not been arrested or made to disappear. But there is
no doubting his immense political courage in compiling and writing it: Chinese
official attitudes toward the disasters of Mao's rule continue to be
ambivalent. The Great Leap Forward may not be sensitive in the same way as Liu
Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei's scholarly and artistic challenges to the present
leadership. There are plenty of books on sale in Beijing bookshops that detail
the darker side of Mao's rule. But writers still need to tread carefully when
they get close to chairman.
A debate has grown up on the nuances of interpreting the
Great Leap Forward famine. One view is that while Mao must take clear
responsibility for the policy, his fellow members of the Politburo were also
complicit in its implementation. The accounts of high-level leadership meetings
such as the Lushan conference bear this out dismally. Nor did leadership style
improve after the famine; Roderick Macfarquhar and Michael Schoenhals's
devastating Mao's
Last Revolution (2006) makes it clear that all the leading figures
in China were behind Mao's Cultural Revolution policies – at least until Mao
turned against them. Another important element when considering the famine is
that not all of China suffered equally badly. In some provinces, local
officials and the wider population found ways to relieve the horrors of famine,
opening up grain reserves or simply moving to other areas. In addition, there
was never another famine: after 1962, the party-state learned how to prevent it
recurring.
Yet these qualifications should not obscure the main
indictment. Famines are political, from the Irish potato famine to the Bengal
famine of 1943 to Ethiopia in the 1980s. As Amartya
Sen has argued, the problem is not absolute lack of food but the systemic
flaws or decisions that prevent food getting to the people. During the Great
Leap Forward, Mao and his leadership colleagues took specific decisions that
led to mass starvation. They perpetuated a system that encouraged people to
tell lies about grain production and discouraged transparency, making
starvation worse.
When the whole leadership (not just Mao) was confronted with
Peng's criticisms, they rounded on the critic and allowed the policy to
continue for another two years. That was the moment at which the leadership
lurched into criminal irresponsibility. It may not have been murder or genocide
but it was an unconscionable decision nonetheless, because – unlike, say, the
Henan famine, which took place in the middle of a war – there were no external
circumstances that could be used to excuse it. Yang Jisheng's book is not just
a tombstone for his father and other famine victims, but for the reputation of
the Communist party's leadership at a time when they should have acted – and
failed to do so.
see also
Tom Phillips - Beijing shuts down art exhibition on violence against women
The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
The Crises of Party Culture: by Yang Guang
