Anne Applebaum: A tombstone on China's history
[Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post.]
Cymbals clashed; a giant scroll unfurled. There were fireworks, kites, ancient soldiers marching in formation, modern dancers bending their bodies into impossible shapes, astronauts, puppets, little children, multiple high-tech gizmos. The Olympic opening ceremony showed you China as China wants you to see it.
But for a deeper understanding of how far China has come - and of how odd its transformation continues to be - switch off the Olympics and consider the existence of a new book, Tombstone. It is the first proper history of China's great famine, a crisis partly created by the Chinese Communist Party and its first leader, Mao Zedong.
"It is a tombstone for my 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," writes Yang Jisheng in the first paragraph.
Tombstone has not been translated. Nevertheless, rumors of its contents and short excerpts are already ricocheting around the world. (I first learned of it in California, from an excited Australian historian.)
Based on a decade's worth of interviews, and unprecedented access to documents and statistics, Tombstone, at two volumes and 1,100 pages, establishes beyond doubt that China's misguided charge toward industrialisation - Mao's "Great Leap Forward" - was an utter disaster.
A combination of criminally bad policies (farmers were forced to make steel instead of growing crops; peasants were forced into unproductive communes) and official cruelty (China was grimly exporting grain at the time) created, between 1959 and 1961, one of the worst famines in history...
Read entire article at Telegraph
Cymbals clashed; a giant scroll unfurled. There were fireworks, kites, ancient soldiers marching in formation, modern dancers bending their bodies into impossible shapes, astronauts, puppets, little children, multiple high-tech gizmos. The Olympic opening ceremony showed you China as China wants you to see it.
But for a deeper understanding of how far China has come - and of how odd its transformation continues to be - switch off the Olympics and consider the existence of a new book, Tombstone. It is the first proper history of China's great famine, a crisis partly created by the Chinese Communist Party and its first leader, Mao Zedong.
"It is a tombstone for my 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," writes Yang Jisheng in the first paragraph.
Tombstone has not been translated. Nevertheless, rumors of its contents and short excerpts are already ricocheting around the world. (I first learned of it in California, from an excited Australian historian.)
Based on a decade's worth of interviews, and unprecedented access to documents and statistics, Tombstone, at two volumes and 1,100 pages, establishes beyond doubt that China's misguided charge toward industrialisation - Mao's "Great Leap Forward" - was an utter disaster.
A combination of criminally bad policies (farmers were forced to make steel instead of growing crops; peasants were forced into unproductive communes) and official cruelty (China was grimly exporting grain at the time) created, between 1959 and 1961, one of the worst famines in history...