User:Arilang1234/Draft/Tombstone(Book)

Tombstone is a book written by Yang Jisheng

External link
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR2008081102015.html
 * A Forgotten Calamity. Henan during the Great Famine (1958–1961) Ewa Rzanna|Institutes for Human Sciences

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/world/asia/18iht-famine.1.18785257.html

BEIJING — For such a bold writer, Yang Jisheng comes across as a surprisingly quiet, almost shy, scholarly man. Yet this slightly built 68-year-old retiree has become something of a thorn in the side of the Chinese authorities in recent years.

After a 35-year stint as a journalist for Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, Yang has made a name for himself writing about things the Chinese Communist Party would rather people forgot.

His latest book, "Mu Bei" ("Tombstone"), published this year in Hong Kong, has been hailed as the most comprehensive and authoritative account by a mainland Chinese writer of the Great Famine of late 1958 to 1962, which was precipitated by the calamitous economic policies of Mao's Great Leap Forward and cost the lives of tens of millions of Chinese.

The title, he writes in the opening passage, has several meanings: "It's a tombstone for my father who died of starvation in 1959, it's a tombstone for the 36 million Chinese who starved to death, it's a tombstone for the system that led to the Great Famine."

He adds: "There was also a great political risk involved in writing this book. If something happens to me because of this, at least I'm making a sacrifice for the sake of my ideals, so this would also be a tombstone for myself."

The two-volume, 1,100-page work is banned in China, as is his previous book, "Political Struggles in China's Age of Reform," which contains his account of the 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and three interviews with former Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang. Zhao, who was purged for sympathizing with the students, met with Yang while under house arrest.

The authorities were so nervous about that first book - the interviews had been publicized in the overseas press  -  that they summoned him several times and ordered him to cancel its publication. He refused, and it was released in Hong Kong in 2004. After Zhao died in 2005, Yang was monitored by a plainclothes police officer to ensure he did not attend the funeral.

"My wife was really quite scared, but she couldn't stop me," he laughed in an interview in the office of the history journal Yanhuang Chunqiu, where he is deputy publisher. "She didn't want me to write, because that had led to a lot of trouble."

Why then does he feel compelled to write about such sensitive topics?

"There are too many lies in China in the past, even history can be fabricated," said Yang, in the earthy accent of his native Hubei Province.

"Deceiving children is a sin," he said. "But they have deceived two, three generations of people already, so this generation cannot lie to the next generation again."

He said for many young Chinese today, events like the famine, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen crackdown hardly register. So he feels it imperative that he write down what he knows and has seen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/world/asia/18iht-famine.1.18785257.html?_r=1

Yang says that he himself was among those deceived and, as a state journalist, propagated the lies he was told.

After he graduated from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1966, the year the decade-long Cultural Revolution began, he was assigned to be a reporter at Xinhua. Like other journalists at the time, he followed Communist Party guidelines, writing nothing but praise of the leadership.

"When I looked through hundreds of stories I wrote during the Cultural Revolution, I realized that over 90 percent of them could not stand the test of history," he said. "You could say I'm not personally responsible, but I feel I owe it to history."

A fervent adherent of Communist ideals in his early years, Yang said he long believed that Mao's Great Leap Forward - an ambitious plan of rapid industrialization  -  was a success, even though his own father was among its victims. In 1959, he did not occur to him that his father's death was part of a larger man-made catastrophe.

"I didn't blame the government at all. I didn't know what was happening in faraway places. I thought what happened in my home village was an isolated phenomenon," said Yang, who at the time was working at a school elsewhere in the country.

It was not until nearly a decade later that he learned, from a Red Guard document, that the governor of Hubei had said that 300,000 had died in his province alone during the famine.

"Once I realized we had been deceived, a strong feeling grew within me," he said. "The more they wanted to hide the truth, the more I wanted to seek the truth."