MCLC: Tombstone, two reviews

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Tombstone, two reviews
***********************************************************

Source: The Economist (10/27/12):
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21565145-shocking-chinese-acco
unt-chairman-mao%E2%80%99s-great-famine-millennial-madness

Millennial madness
A shocking Chinese account of Chairman Mao’s great famine

------------------------------------------
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962. By Yang Jisheng. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux; 629 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30.
-----------------------------------------

IN 1959 an 18-year-old student named Yang Jisheng was summoned home from
his boarding school in central China by a friend who told him that his
father was starving to death. Mr Yang returned immediately to his village,
just in time to see his emaciated father before he died. The young
idealist, already a member of the Communist Youth League, grieved deeply,
but never thought to blame the government. “Compared with the advent of
the great communist society,” he writes, “what was my family’s petty
misfortune?”

For more than two decades, Mr Yang believed the official version of Mao
Zedong’s disastrous economic experiment known as the Great Leap Forward,
that it was caused by natural disasters. Even after he became a senior
reporter for Xinhua, the official news agency, and learnt how the party
manipulated and manufactured news, he remained a true believer. Only as
China opened up in the 1980s did Mr Yang start to question what he had
been told. The killing of demonstrators in Beijing in 1989 was a rude
awakening. “The blood of those young students cleansed my brain of all the
lies I had accepted over the previous decades.” And so he set out to shake
off the deception and shake up the system that he had spent his life
supporting.

The result is “Tombstone”, a shocking account of what are known
euphemistically in China as the Three Years of Economic Difficulty. Frank
Dikotter’s excellent book on the same subject came out two years ago, but
this is the first detailed analysis of the famine written by a Chinese
author who lived through it. Published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2008,
the book is now coming out in English for the first time. The original
1,200 pages have been condensed, and are all the punchier for it.

The Great Leap Forward was the high point of ignorant Maoist folly.
Chairman Mao said in 1957 that China could well overtake the industrial
output of Britain within 15 years. People left the fields to build
backyard furnaces in which pots and pans were melted down to produce
steel. The end product was unusable. As farmers abandoned the land, their
commune leaders reported hugely exaggerated grain output to show their
ideological fervour. The state took its share on the basis of these
inflated figures and villagers were left with little or nothing to eat.
When they complained, they were labelled counter-revolutionary and
punished severely. As the cadres feasted, the people starved. Mr Yang
calculates that about 36m died as a result.

After he retired, he used his contacts to gain access to restricted
documents in archives all over China, claiming he was researching the
history of grain policy. Some archivists were aware of what he was doing,
but chose to turn a blind eye.
He picked “Tombstone” as a title chiefly to honour his father, and also
the millions who died. He jokes darkly that the book could end up being
his own tombstone too. Yet, despite it being banned in mainland China, Mr
Yang continues to live freely in Beijing, editing a reformist magazine.

The system has not died either, though it still jealously guards its own
interpretation of history. Mr Yang’s book is a blood-soaked case study of
what happens when a regime with no checks and balances collides with an
ignorant ideological fervour. Chinese schoolbooks, however, prefer to
gloss over the period completely.

“Tombstone” is meticulous in its research and exhaustive in the detail it
accumulates for the reader: of villages strewn with corpses, of widespread
cannibalism, and of the violence that exploded as one man’s millennial
vision was unleashed. It also stands as a warning to modern supporters of
the one-party state, who praise the ability of an autocracy to get things
done. Even if today’s policies are less harsh, Mr Yang shows, the
possibility of unchecked brutality is ever present. Nowadays the Communist
Party is not causing widespread famine. But the same kiss-up, kick-down
hierarchy persists, where every official is slave to his immediate
superior and a dictator to his subordinates. Targets of the one-child
policy, for instance, must be met, regardless of the human toll and future
danger. Conversely, the truth about big problems around the country, such
as the environment or corruption or food safety, must be covered up.

How much longer can this last? The government’s monopoly on information
once afforded it a monopoly on truth. But information now floods in,
especially via the internet. Mr Yang’s book is part of a broader attempt
at last in China to discuss the history of the 1950s and 1960s. Chinese
newspapers have begun publishing articles about the Great Leap Forward.
Chinese microblogs have discussed openly what happened, though none as
frankly as Mr Yang. History is slowly becoming a topic of discussion and
an issue on which ordinary Chinese do not have to follow official
propaganda slavishly. During recent anti-Japanese riots, a surprising
number of people went against decades of government propaganda to complain
about the crudity and stupidity of the protests. If the party can no
longer control the past, who knows if it can still control the future?


=====================================================

From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>

Source: NY Review of Books (11/22/12):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/22/china-worse-you-ever-i
magined/

China: Worse Than You Ever Imagined
By Ian Johnson 

-----------------------------------------------------
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962
by Yang Jisheng, translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 629 pp., $35.00

The Great Famine in China, 1958–1962: A Documentary History
edited by Zhou Xun
Yale University Press, 204 pp., $45.00

Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe,
1958–1962
by Frank Dikötter
Walker, 420 pp., $20.00 (paper)

Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai dajihuang jiushi [Tombstone: A True History
of the Great Famine in China in the 1960s]
by Yang Jisheng
Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, Volume 1: 636 pp., Volume 2: 1,208
pp., $30.96

Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine
by Jasper Becker
Holt, 325 pp., $21.99 (paper)
-----------------------------------------------------

Last summer I took a trip to Xinyang, a rural area of wheat fields and tea
plantations in central China’s Henan province. I met a pastor, a former
political prisoner, and together we made a day trip to Rooster Mountain, a
onetime summer retreat for Western missionaries and later for Communist
officials. From its peak we looked down on China’s Central Plains, which
stretch six hundred miles up toward Beijing.

Over the past few decades, the region below us had become one of the
centers of Christianity in China, and I asked him why. He said it was a
reaction to the lawlessness and rootlessness in local society. “Henan is
chaotic,” he said, “and we offer something moral amid so much immorality.”

I thought of the many scandals that have hit Henan province in recent
years—the “AIDS villages” populated by locals who sold their blood to
companies that reused infected needles, or the charismatic millennial
movements that had sprung up. Crime is high and local officials
notoriously brutal, running their districts like fiefdoms. But didn’t many
other parts of China have such troubles?

“It’s different here,” he said slowly, looking at me carefully, trying to
explain something very complex and painful that he wasn’t sure would be
comprehensible. “Traditional life was wiped out around the time I was
born, fifty years ago. Since then it has been a difficult area, with no
foundation to society. Most people in China haven’t heard of this but here
in Xinyang, people all know.

“It was called the Xinyang Incident. It destroyed this area like the wrath
of God on Judgment Day.”

The Xinyang Incident is the subject of the first chapter of Tombstone: The
Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng’s
epic account of the worst famine in history. Yang conservatively estimates
that 36 million people died of unnatural causes, mostly due to starvation
but also government-instigated torture and murder of those who opposed the
Communist Party’s maniacal economic plans that caused the catastrophe. Its
epicenter was Xinyang County, where one in eight people died from the
famine. The sixty pages Yang spends on Xinyang are a tour de force, a
brutal vignette of people dying at the sides of roads, family members
eating one another to survive, police blocking refugees from leaving
villages, and desperate pleas ignored by Mao Zedong and his spineless
courtiers. It is a chapter that describes a society laid so low that the
famine’s effects are still felt half a century later.

Originally published in 2008, the Chinese version ofTombstone is a
legendary book in China.1 It is hard to find an intellectual in Beijing
who has not read it, even though it remains banned and was only published
in Hong Kong. Yang’s great success is using the Communist Party’s own
records to document, as he puts it, “a tragedy unprecedented in world
history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to
cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or
epidemics.”
Tombstone is a landmark in the Chinese people’s own efforts to confront
their history, despite the fact that the party responsible for the Great
Famine is still in power. This fact is often lost on outsiders who wonder
why the Chinese haven’t delved into their history as deeply as the Germans
or Russians or Cambodians. In this sense, Yang is like Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn: someone inside the system trying to uncover its darkest
secrets.

Like The Gulag Archipelago, Yang’s Tombstone is a flawed work that has
benefited by being shortened in translation. The original work spun out of
control, with Yang trying to incorporate everything he found and
constantly recapitulating key points. This is one reason why the original
was over 1,800 pages and published in two volumes. The English version is
half the length and reorganized by Yang in conjunction with the
translators, Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian, and an outside editor, the
University of Wisconsin’s Edward Friedman. The result is a much more
compact book with Yang’s most important work clearly showcased.

The original book started out with fourteen provincial case studies
followed by six “policy” chapters and eight “analysis” chapters. The
translation begins, like the original, with Yang’s powerful chapter on
Xinyang but then alternates provincial case studies with the broader
chapters on policy and analysis. Only four of the fourteen provincial
chapters are in the English translation but from my reading of both
versions it seems that they have cut almost none of Yang’s key findings,
including interviews with victims and those responsible for the famine,
and his best scoops from the archives. The English version retains all six
policy chapters and five of the eight analysis chapters.

Yang’s travails in piecing together the book are part of its lore.2 As a
reporter for the government’s Xinhua news agency, he had been a blindly
loyal Party member. The turning point was the 1989 Tiananmen Square
massacre: “The blood of those young students cleansed my brain of all the
lies I had accepted over the previous decades.” That made him determined
to write the history of the Great Famine, which had touched him directly:
he had watched his father die in front of him, at the time thinking it was
an isolated tragedy and only later realizing that tens of millions had
also died.

The story Yang tells is by now familiar in broad strokes thanks to the
work of earlier writers, especially for foreigners, notably Jasper
Becker’s 1996 bookHungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine, but also because of
the findings of demographers, local studies specialists, and Chinese
memoirists and researchers who have over the years pulled together the
basic facts. Yang’s contribution is to have written a large-scale history
based on these works and his own pioneering research in Chinese archives.
His main point is to prove that the Party, from the village chief up to
Chairman Mao, knew exactly what was going on but was too warped by
ideology to change course until tens of millions had died. Like
Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the book is a cry of outrage from a
victim. Yang vowed to erect for his father an everlasting tombstone, one
that would not crumble or fall with time, and he did so with this book.

The famine grew out of Mao’s desire to speed up China’s development and
force it into a utopian Communist vision that few in the Communist Party’s
leadership had thought possible or desirable. When the Communists took
power they had forced through a brutal land reform that killed millions of
landlords and imagined enemies, but they had also redistributed property
to peasants—an immensely popular measure that won Mao goodwill among many
people. Then, however, Mao began to press for speedier development known
as “rash advance.” Yang shows how the two other most influential leaders
in the Party, Vice Chairman Liu Shaoqi and Premier Zhou Enlai, opposed
“rash advance.” As early as 1951 Liu opposed collectivized agriculture as
“erroneous, dangerous, fantastical.”

In 1957, however, Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, a wave of
terror that wiped out or cowed much of the intelligentsia, terrifying even
members of his inner circle. That allowed him to pursue collectivization,
which reversed land reform by taking land from the peasants. Instead of
peasants owning the land, the state did, giving it complete control over
agricultural production. Enthusiasm fell, and with it production.

The problem took a deadly turn when Mao began to endorse opportunistic
officials who boasted that the communes had created “Sputnik harvests.”
Henan, where the first communes had been formed in 1958, later that year
began claiming wildly exaggerated yields of 1,000 kilograms of wheat per
muof land (a mu is one sixth of an acre)—fanciful numbers that defied
common sense and science. Local governments began to outdo one another
trying to offer the biggest harvests, which they had to deliver to state
granaries. Often, these were nothing more than mounds of husks covered
with a thin layer of grain, but once-skeptical officials like Zhou and Liu
endorsed these magical results during public inspection tours. Local
officials began sending all their village’s harvests to granaries to meet
these impossible targets, leaving villagers with nothing to eat.

Adding to the problem were the harmless-sounding “communal kitchens,” in
which everyone ate. The kitchens took on a sinister aspect because of a
nonsensical plan to boost steel production by melting down everything from
hoes and plows to the family wok and meat cleaver. Families thus couldn’t
cook and had to eat in the canteens, giving the state complete control
over the supply of food. At first, people gorged themselves, but when food
became scarce, the kitchens controlled who lived and who died:

<<The staff of the communal kitchens held the ladles, and therefore
enjoyed 
the greatest power in distributing food. They could dredge a richer stew
from the bottom of a pot or merely skim a few vegetable slices from the
thin broth near the surface.>>

These posts, of course, went to the Party’s most trusted members or
relatives.

By early 1959, people were dying in huge numbers and many officials were
urgently recommending that the communes be disbanded. The opposition went
up to the very top, with one of the most famous Communist military
leaders, Peng Dehuai, leading the opposition. Mao, however,
counterattacked at an important meeting at Lushan in July and August 1959
that turned what had been a contained disaster into one of history’s
greatest catastrophes. At the Lushan Conference, Mao purged Peng and his
supporters, accusing them of “right-opportunism.” Chastened officials
returned to the provinces eager to save their careers, duplicating Mao’s
attack on Peng at the local level. As Yang puts it: “In a political system
such as China’s, those below imitate those above, and political struggles
at the higher levels are replicated at the lower levels in an expanded and
even more ruthless form.”

Officials launched campaigns to dig up grain that peasants were allegedly
hiding. Of course, the grain didn’t exist, but anyone who said otherwise
was tortured and often killed. That October, the famine began in earnest
in Xinyang, accompanied by the murder of skeptics of Mao’s policies. Yang
describes in graphic detail how Xinyang officials beat one colleague who
had opposed the communes. They ripped out his hair and beat him day after
day, dragging him out of his bed and standing around him, kicking until he
died. One official cited by Yang estimates that 12,000 such “struggle
sessions” occurred in the region. Some people were hung up by ropes and
set on fire. Others had their heads smashed open. Many were put in the
middle of a circle and pushed, punched, and jostled for hours until they
collapsed and died.

Yang interviewed a colleague at the Xinhua news agency who had been
stationed in Xinyang. During a long-distance bus ride, he said, “I could
see one corpse after another in the ditches along the roadway, but no one
on the bus dared to talk about the starvation.” The reporter found out
that a third of the population in some areas had died while “the leading
cadres continued to stuff themselves.” But “after I personally witnessed
how people who spoke the truth were brought to ruin, how could I dare to
write an internal reference report?

The starvation led to the destruction of human relations. In one case, an
official heard about a teenage girl whose parents had died. Near death,
she killed her four-year-old brother and ate him. Filled with pity and a
sense of helplessness, the official finally arrested the girl, reasoning
that at least in jail she might get something to eat.

Local granaries were rarely opened, with officials who dared to do so
punished, often with death. Meanwhile, farmers couldn’t leave their
villages. A Central Committee “urgent communiqué” declared anyone leaving
rural areas to be a vagrant. Local officials enforced the travel ban
brutally, beating thousands to death. Police controlled all train
stations. Long-distance buses were driven only by Party members. Postal
service was so heavily monitored that it essentially shut down. Rural
China had become a gulag without food. “The peasants could only stay home
and await death,” Yang writes.

When Mao finally heard about the Xinyang Incident in 1960, he acted
delusionally, declaring that landlords had retaken control and wrecked his
utopian experiment. One main culprit he identified was the daughters of
landlords, whom he accused of marrying Communist Party officials and
ruining them. An inspection team headed by a senior Party member arrived
in Xinyang and concluded that local officials were responsible for failing
to follow Beijing’s orders. Of course they had been following Beijing’s
orders, which is why the starvation had taken place. No matter, several
thousand were arrested and beaten, and hundreds were killed. That meant an
even further hardening of local officials against any sort of rational
response. The famine continued, spreading nationally and claiming tens of
millions.

In subsequent chapters, Yang shows how hastily conceived dams and canals
contributed to the famine. In some areas, peasants weren’t allowed to
plant crops; instead, they were ordered to dig ditches and haul dirt. That
resulted in starvation and useless projects, most of which collapsed or
washed away. In one telling example, peasants were told they couldn’t use
shoulder poles to carry dirt because this method looked backward. Instead,
they were ordered to build carts. For that they needed ball bearings,
which they were told to make at home. Naturally, none of the primitive
bearings worked.

Despite his personal loss, Yang remains sober and balanced throughout the
book. He lays the blame firmly on the top leaders—not just Mao but also
supposed moderates like Liu and Zhou. In imperial China, Yang says, power
was centered in the Confucian bureaucracy but the truth lay in religion
and philosophical texts, such as the Confucian classics. In Maoist China,
by contrast, the leader was the sage, meaning there was no ideological
alternative to Mao. “China’s government became a secular theocracy that
united the center of power with the center of truth” is Yang’s pithy but
telling analysis.

Yang doesn’t spare Mao, Liu, or Zhou, but he also blames Chinese society
for wanting to believe that leaders had a quick and easy solution to
China’s backwardness. Mostly, he blames the Communist political system for
allowing such a leader as Mao to take power—a far more damning indictment
of today’s China than simply blaming Mao:

<<The problem lay in arbitrary and dictatorial decision making at the
expense of good practice, and coercive implementation that deprived people
of their rights and property. Both flaws were rooted in the political
system.>>

At this point, it is impossible not to mention the Dutch historian Frank
Dikötter and his 2010 book, Mao’s Great Famine.3 Dikötter is a talented
historian at Hong Kong University who has a nose for hot topics; his
previous books have discussed race, sex, eugenics, crime, and opium. Most
of them have a strongly contrarian streak, sometimes presenting ideas in
new, startling ways. Chinese have troubling ideas of race. Opium wasn’t
really such a problem. The Republican era that preceded the Communist one
was far better than its reputation. All of these are worthwhile ideas and
it’s fair to say that Dikötter’s 1992 book, The Discourse of Race in
Modern China, is a classic that is as vital today as it was twenty years
ago.

His book on famine was rightly hailed as a valuable history and it’s
little wonder that it won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize, which is awarded
to English-language nonfiction books. It differs from Yang’s book by
putting most of the blame on Mao; on the first page we’re told he is
comparable to Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot. For Dikötter, it is essential
that the reader accept Mao’s full culpability, much in the same way that
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s biography of Mao aims to put him in the
pantheon of twentieth-century monsters.4

This is certainly a defensible position. Still, a confusing preface makes
it seem that his book is a pathbreaking work, rather than one whose
primary contribution is to have been written in English, and in a
conventional, linear narrative. Dikötter hails a new official archival
law, which he curiously claims is “fundamentally changing the way one can
study the Maoist era,” when in fact it only allowed a brief window of
access in the early 2000s that was all but closed for sensitive topics by
2007. The documents he accumulated, he says, form a “massive and detailed
dossier [that] transforms our understanding of the Great Leap Forward.”

His main claims, he says, are to offer a higher death toll—45 million—and
to show the violence used to enforce Mao’s policies. He also claims to
link for the first time the horror in the villages with the decisions made
in Beijing. Dikötter’s number of deaths is a guesstimate, but a good one,
and he deserves respect and a serious hearing. He and his researchers also
made valuable finds in the archives, which solidify what is already known.
He is also a gifted narrative writer. But he can’t present his claims as
entirely original except by ignoring Tombstone.

Dikötter doesn’t exactly ignore Tombstone. Instead, in a self-serving
essay on sources at the end of his book, he spends half a page criticizing
the Chinese version of Yang’s work (which came out two years before his
own). Dikötter credits Yang with being one of the first to use provincial
archives, and especially for his work in the Henan provincial archives.
But he then goes on to say the book has “serious shortcomings,” at times
looking “like a hotchpotch which simply strings together large chunks of
text, some lifted from the Web.” The material is so uneven, Dikötter says,
that it’s hard for the reader “to see the wood for the trees.” Dikötter
goes further in a Chinese-language interview in Asia Weekly, in which he
claims that Yang’s province-by-province analysis is “boring” and,
incredibly, that Yang only blames Mao and not the system.5

Without specific citations from Dikötter it’s hard to know exactly what he
means when he accuses Yang of lifting information from the Internet. It is
true that in the Chinese edition Yang cited survivor memoirs published
online, a common practice in China, where the publishing industry is in
state hands. (Some of these memoirs were later published in Hong Kong and
the English version cites these published versions.)

As for Yang’s prose, a more generous view would be that he simply was
trying to get on paper everything he could because so little is known.
It’s clear that Yang wouldn’t have been awarded a doctorate from a Western
university for the Chinese version of Tombstone. He wrote the book under
trying circumstances, not from the perch of a university, aided by
editors, graduate students, and associates to do some of his research. But
it’s Dikötter who misses the forest for the trees in not seeing the
historic value of this work.

Tombstone is not perfect. It lacks an adequate discussion of Mao’s rural
industrialization and foreign policy. It could also have used more
forward-looking conclusions about how the famine led to the Cultural
Revolution and, ultimately, today’s reform period. Even the slimmed-down
English version lacks, as Dikötter notes of the Chinese version, a clear
historical line. A chronology at the start helps, but it’s not as easily
digestible as a traditional historical narrative starting in the 1950s and
ending in the 1960s. Still, the English version solves most of this by
leading with Yang’s best account—the Xinyang episode—and following that
with a chapter on the historic roots of the crisis. That’s followed by
another provincial chapter with vivid description followed by the next
step in the narrative, and so on.

A more interesting companion to Tombstone is the work of Dikötter’s
research collaborator at Hong Kong University, the mainland Chinese
archival and oral historian Zhou Xun. As we learn from her
acknowledgements, she and Dikötter shared two research grants to seek
material on the famine and they also shared their findings. Her book, The
Great Famine in China, is a selected compilation of these documents,
mostly from archives in her native Sichuan and neighboring Guizhou
provinces. As Zhou makes clear in her introduction, most of these
documents would be unobtainable today because of the newly restrictive
policies.

Her book is an invaluable resource, providing a look at the disaster in
the Party’s own words. The documents are ordered roughly chronologically,
and take the reader through the Great Leap Forward from beginning to end,
and then tackle various effects of the famine. One section has reports on
cannibalism with a series of horrifyingly matter-of-fact accounts:

<<Date: February 1960. Location: Zhangzigou backside village in Hanji
commune. Culprit’s name: Yi Wucheng. Culprit’s status: Poor peasant.
Number of victims: 4. Manner of crime: Exhumed the victims’ corpses and
consumed the flesh. Reason: To survive.>>

Zhou also has an intriguing section on religion, with reports on the
desperate turn to faith by people whose secular God—Mao—had failed them.
In one, the Sichuan Province Public Security Bureau worriedly notes a
saying going around a village: “The heavenly army is coming soon, and
Chairman Mao will not last long.”

This lack of belief is something that Yang discusses in his analysis of
the famine’s legacy:

<<Repeated self-abasement led people continuously to trample upon those
things they most cherished and flatter those things they had always most
despised. In this way the totalitarian system caused the degeneration of
the national character of the Chinese people.>>

But just as China is undergoing a spiritual revival today, its people are
also beginning to revive history. Xinyang is now home to two tiny
memorials to the famine.6 More striking, earlier this year a national
newspaper ran a multipage supplement on the famine—an unprecedented
recognition of this disaster.7 When I asked an editor at a leading Party
newspaper why this was, he had a one-word answer: “Tombstone.”

It would be simplistic to say Tombstone alone has set off this rethinking
of Chinese history. Instead, like any great book it is part of something
bigger, in this case a desire by many Chinese people to reconsider their
society’s future by clarifying its past.


Footnotes:

1. Reviewed in these pages
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/china-famine-oslo/>
by Perry Link, January 13, 2011.

2. See my interview with Yang, “ Finding the Facts About Mao’s Victims
<http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/dec/20/finding-facts-about-maos-
victims/>,” NYR blog, December 20, 2010.

3. Reviewed in these pages
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/10/worst-man-made-catast
rophe-ever/> by Roderick MacFarquhar, February 10, 2011.

4. Mao: The Unknown Story (Knopf, 2005).

5. Jiang Xun, “Questioning the Systemic Causes of the Holocaust,” Asia
Weekly, October 30, 2011. Yang issued a reply on the Independent Chinese
PEN Center site

6. See Zhang Zhilong. “Starved of Memories,” Global Times, September 6,
2012.

7. See Liu Yang Shuo, “A Farmer’s Memorial to the ‘Grain Stoppage,’”
Southern People Weekly, May 18, 2012.