Famine to feast
The dogs had been stewed and the tree stripped of its bark.
But it wasn’t enough. In 1959, in the darkest depths of China’s Great Famine, Yang Jisheng watched the uncle who raised him starve to death.
The experience led to journalist Yang’s magnum opus: his book Tombstone, first published in 2008 in Hong Kong and translated into English in 2013. A direct outcome of Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward, Yang estimates that the 1959-61 famine left 36 million dead.
Many resorted to eating corpses and violence was commonplace. In the name of Mao’s larger goal of collectivised farming, the Communist Party stuck resolutely to its policies, with deadly consequences.
Yang, whom I met when I was a reporter for one reason: to commemorate the dead – and in particular his uncle. This mattered in a country which to this day has largely erased the famine (euphemistically referred to by the Party as the “three years of natural disasters”) from school history books and official tracts. remains banned on the mainland, censorship is rife, and next to no physical memorials exist.
