By Richard McGregor

Published: June 12 2010 00:42 | Last updated: June 12 2010 00:42

Yang JishengWhen the first editions of Tombstone landed in Hong Kong
bookshops in mid-2008, they had to be stacked like old-fashioned telephone
directories, one on top of the other. The book’s intimidating physical
presence matched the gravity of its content.

Tombstone took its author, Yang Jisheng, nearly two decades of painstaking
research to compile. In two volumes, it gives a minutely chronicled and
irrefutable account of the death by starvation of 35-40 million Chinese
between 1958 and 1961. It details a tragedy the ruling Communist party has
long sought to cover over.

Yang’s epic work was confirmation of what any student of world affairs
outside China already knew – that Mao Zedong’s utopian plans to accelerate
the establishment of what he called “true Communism” had produced the worst
man-made famine in recorded history. Almost as remarkable as the book itself
was how Yang, a journalist with Xinhua, the official state news agency, had
managed to research and write it.

For most of his career, Yang, 69, had faithfully done what Xinhua reporters
do: write stories, cleared through the propaganda system, for the public
news wire. Backstage, he performed a second, covert function required of
senior Xinhua journalists – he provided secret internal reports to the party
itself. Yang had not pulled his punches in these on-the-ground dispatches,
vital to Beijing’s efforts to monitor officials outside the capital. A
number of his reports, about the military’s abuse of its powers, economic
decline and official corruption, landed on the desks of senior leaders in
Beijing, to the consternation of the party bosses in the regions where he
was based. It was not until 1989 that Yang, angry and disillusioned over the
violent military crackdown around Tiananmen Square, set off on a new path.

Instead of spying on the regions for Beijing, Yang launched a mission
against his masters. Using the privileges afforded a senior Xinhua
journalist, Yang was able to penetrate state archives around the country and
uncover the most complete picture of the great famine that any researcher,
foreign or local, has ever managed. The book he wrote was the consummate
inside job, the product of a lengthy, clandestine co-operation with fellow
party members determined to expose the lies told about the famine in China
for decades.

Yang was helped by scores of collaborators within the system – demographers
who had toiled quietly for years in government agencies to compile an
accurate picture of the loss of life; local officials who had kept the
ghoulish records of the event in their districts; the keepers of provincial
archives who were happy to open their doors, with a nod and a wink, to a
trusted comrade pretending to research the history of China’s grain
production; and fellow journalists from Xinhua willing to use their contacts
so the true story of the disaster could be told.

. . .

One of the most horrifying tales uncovered by Yang in the course of his
research came from Xinyang, a small city in Henan province, where the famine
was at its worst. When he visited, Yang was not directed to the official
archives as he’d expected, but instead sent to meet Yu Dehong, a retired
cadre from the local waterworks bureau. In their own quiet way, the Xinyang
officials might have been giving Yang a helping hand.

Yu was what you might call the local history crank – except the stories he
nagged people about did not concern municipal landmarks or the arrival of
the city’s first steam train. As the political secretary to the Xinyang
mayor in the late 1950s, Yu was an eyewitness to a mini-Holocaust in his
hometown, its surrounding villages and even his own family.

Mao had ordered Chinese farms to be collectivised in the late 1950s and
forced many peasants who had once productively grown grain to put their
energies into building crude backyard blast furnaces instead. As part of
this “Great Leap Forward”, Mao’s acolytes predicted that food production
would be doubled, even tripled in a few years and that steel production
would soon surpass output in advanced western countries. The new rural
communes began reporting whopping, fake harvests to meet Mao’s demand for
record grain output. When the government took its share of the grain based
on the exaggerated figures, little was left for ordinary people to eat.

According to the most conservative calculations, one million people out of a
population of eight million in Xinyang died between 1958 and 1961. Yu was
often gently advised to drop the issue in the years afterwards. Instead, he
wrote a detailed account in his own name and submitted it to the local party
secretary. “Some people asked me, ‘Haven’t you committed enough mistakes?’”
he said. “But if the official history won’t include this material, then my
private history will. I have the materials to back me up.”

Xinyang was generally blessed with good harvests, unlike much of Henan,
known as the “land of beggars” for its history of impoverishment and
famines. But any advantage the city had was undermined by the officials who
ruled over it. At the time, Henan and Xinyang were overseen by radical
leftists fanatically devoted to Mao who viewed the grain harvest solely
through the prism of violent class struggle. Yu remembers vividly a series
of surreal meetings in 1959, when the 18 counties in Xinyang city reported
their harvest for the year. After a furious debate in which each county
reported wildly exaggerated figures, they settled on a figure about three to
four times the real size of the harvest. The distortion was more than enough
to set in train the disaster that followed. It was not long before mass
starvation began to grip the city and surrounding areas.

Chinese peasants at workAs winter turned to spring in the early months of
1960, a thick smell of death began to rise out of the landscape. Yu
remembers the change of season clearly. Walking around the semi-rural
enclave, he saw thousands of corpses strewn alongside the roads and in the
fields. During the winter, the bodies had hardened and set in the cramped,
bent shapes in which people had died. They looked like they had been taken
out of a freezer and then randomly scattered across the landscape. Some of
the corpses were clothed, but the garments had been ripped from others, and
flesh was missing from their buttocks and legs. In the first days of spring,
the corpses began to thaw, emitting a sickly smell that permeated the
everyday life of a shell-shocked local citizenry.

The surviving residents protested later that they had been too short-handed
and exhausted to give the dead the dignity of a burial. They blamed the
disfigured corpses on hungry dogs, whose eyes, according to rumours which
swept the area, had turned red after gnawing at human flesh. “That is not
true,” said Yu. “All the dogs had already been eaten by humans. How could
there be dogs left at the time?” The corpses hadn’t been eaten by ravenous
animals. They had been cannibalised by local residents. Many people in
Xinyang over that winter, and the two that followed, owed their survival to
consuming dead members of their families, or stray corpses they could get
their hands on.

Stories like Yu’s shocked Yang. “I did not foresee this level of cruelty,”
he said. “There was cannibalism in the ancient time in famines. People used
to talk about ‘exchanging children to eat’, because they could not bear to
eat their own children. But this was much worse.”

It goes without saying that Tombstone could not be released in China. No
publisher dared touch it, even though it sold briskly in Hong Kong. In
Wuhan, a large city in central China, the office of the Committee of
Comprehensive Management of Social Order put Tombstone on a list of
“obscene, pornographic, violent and unhealthy books for children”, to be
confiscated on sight. Otherwise, the party killed Tombstone with silence,
banning its mention in the media but refraining from any attention-grabbing
attacks on the book itself.

To understand the force that stymied attention for Yang’s book is to
understand the battle he fought to report and write it in the first place.
The Central Propaganda Department is the party’s overarching enforcer in
China’s history wars. Its sentries stand guard at all the key points of the
debate: in schools, to oversee textbooks; in think-tanks and universities,
to monitor academic output; with the United Front department, to prepare
what it calls “historically correct” materials for compatriots in Hong Kong
and Taiwan; and throughout the media in all its forms, to scrutinise the
output of everyone from journalists to film directors. Like all large party
offices in the capital, the propaganda department has no listed phone number
and no sign outside its sprawling headquarters. The instructions it issues
to the media are secret.

The propaganda department does not underestimate the gravity of its task.
Nothing less than national security is at stake. “In China, the head of the
Central Propaganda Department is like the Secretary of Defence in the United
States and the Minister of Agriculture in the former Soviet Union,” said Liu
Zhongde, a deputy-director of the department for eight years from 1990. “The
manner by which he brings leadership will affect whether the nation can
maintain stability.”

By the early 1990s, Yang had become a roving economics correspondent for
Xinhua, travelling around the country. He had also resolved to write and put
his name to the stories the party had long suppressed – about the 1989
crackdown; political infighting among top leaders; and most importantly, the
story of the famine. The first job would prove perfect cover for the second.

. . .

Yang’s political epiphany acquired a personal dimension after an interview
with the long-time governor of Hubei. The governor told Yang that the great
famine killed hundreds of thousands of people in Yang’s home province. The
journalist began to rethink his own father’s death in 1959.

Yang had always remembered clearly the moment he found out his father was
dying: he was a teenager at the time, a high-school student and living on a
farm collective. He was also propaganda officer for the local branch of the
Communist Youth League. An enthusiastic supporter of Mao, Yang was in the
middle of writing a wall poster to promote the Three Red Flags campaign,
glorifying the Great Leap Forward and the collectives, when a classmate
burst into the room. “Your father is not going to make it,” the boy said.

Yang later blamed himself for not going home earlier, to dig for wild
vegetables to feed the family. At the time, he did not think to blame Mao or
the Communist party. It was an individual case, something to be handled
within the family. Thirty years later, he developed a different perspective.

On and off during the next decade, Yang locked himself in provincial
archives and pored over their records – population figures, grain
production, weather digests, personnel movements and anything else he could
get his hands on. Researching the great famine was the largest and riskiest
project he had undertaken. Pretending to be investigating rural issues and
grain production, Yang was able to gain access to documents which had been
locked away for decades. If his status as a senior Xinhua reporter wasn’t
enough to get into the archives, he used the relationships his colleagues
had built up with the provincial authorities. “My colleagues knew what I was
doing,” he said. “They secretly supported me.”

In Gansu, in western China, a former Xinhua branch head well-known for his
leftist views backed Yang and handed over materials. In Sichuan, China’s
populous breadbasket, another ageing journalist did the same.

Of course, his ruse did not work every time. In Guizhou, one of China’s
poorest provinces, Yang almost came undone. His colleagues took him to the
provincial party compound to seek permission to access the archives. The
nervous section head consulted the head of the archives, who referred the
request to the deputy of the provincial party secretariat. He referred the
request upwards to his boss, who then decided to consult Beijing. A query to
the central government could have easily exposed the research as a sham. “We
would have been finished,” Yang said. On hearing about the request to
Beijing, Yang coolly excused himself, saying he would come back another
time. Tombstone, as a result, has no detailed chapter on Guizhou.

Yang worried constantly that he would be caught and his colleagues punished.
“I felt like a person going deep into a mountain to seek treasure, all alone
and surrounded by tigers and other beasts,” he says. “It is very dangerous,
as using those materials is prohibited.”

Even the final nationwide death toll, a figure known in the west for more
than two decades, was a revelation. To calculate the number, Yang had the
confidential figures he had gained in the provincial archives. But he also
called on another insider, a Chinese demographer who had for years been
quietly gathering material about the impact of the famine.

Wang Weizhi returned from studying demography in the Soviet Union in 1959,
the first year of the famine, and was employed by the Public Security
Bureau, or police, where he worked for the next three decades. The job was
to give him a unique vantage point to track the famine’s impact. China
conducted just three censuses in the first three and half decades of
Communist rule – in 1953, 1964 and 1982. The police, by comparison, compiled
household registration data from around the country and updated it twice a
year. Wang, in theory, had access to fresh population figures submitted
directly to the centre from each county in the country.

Wang got his first inkling of the on-the-ground impact of the famine in
1962, when he was sent to Fengyang, in Anhui, an area that suffered a death
toll on a par with Xinyang. The team was not dispatched to investigate the
reports of starvation which had been reaching Beijing in the previous two
years. That would have been too politically sensitive. They were sent to
find out why there had been such a spike in the birth rate that year. The
villagers rather sardonically told the visitors from Beijing they should
expect another birth spurt in 1963. The reasons weren’t difficult to fathom.
The elderly and the young had been wiped out in the famine. “The oldest
person left in the area was 43 and the youngest was seven,” said Wang.

Wang struggled for years to get his hands on a full set of state statistics
from within his own workplace. During the Cultural Revolution, access to the
numbers recorded during the famine was restricted. Anything before 1958 was
easy. Anything later was difficult. “At the time, the figures were very
sensitive, and very few people were allowed to have them,” Wang said. “Only
the top five people in Shandong, for example, could see the Public Security
Bureau figures: the party secretary and the governor and their deputies, and
the police chief.” When the political climate improved in the late 1970s,
Wang quietly began to collect materials. But it wasn’t until Yang came
knocking on his door in the 1990s that he put forward his own estimate of
the death toll for publication: 35 million.

In person, Wang seems very much a bloodless functionary, approaching the
tragedy as a professional demographer rather than someone with a political
axe to grind. He sticks strictly to the numbers, telling the story through
the tables of figures in an old government population book that sits in the
corner of his office at home, covered in thick dust. Look here, he says,
brushing the dust off and stabbing his finger at a column of figures showing
the population of one province dropping by three million. He shrugged when I
asked what the reaction had been in China in the 1980s when the real death
toll had started to leak out. “Because it was so long ago, people were
rather indifferent,” he replied. Wang’s professionalism made him invaluable
to Yang. In a country where little is untainted by politics, Wang sticks
simply to the facts. He said he was happy to assist Yang. “For me, these are
the facts and if someone wants to investigate, I will give them the facts.”

. . .

To this day, the Chinese government has never said how many people it thinks
died, although it commissioned a study in the mid-1980s for internal
circulation. The academic who prepared that study had spent most of his life
as a lecturer in automated production systems in Xian before studying
demography for barely a year in India. He came up with a figure of 17
million premature deaths. The study has been widely dismissed because it
looked mainly at recorded deaths. “Half of the excess deaths did not get
recorded at the time. People were focusing on survival, not statistics,”
said Judith Banister, a US demographer. Meanwhile the study’s author, Jiang
Zhenghua, was richly rewarded for his work and was promoted eventually to
become vice-chairman of the National People’s Congress.

Yang had steeled himself for a backlash from the authorities in the wake of
Tombstone. He was certainly vulnerable. He still lived with his wife in a
Beijing apartment provided by Xinhua for his retirement and banks his
government pension cheque every month. But so far, nothing has happened. His
collaborators remain similarly unmolested by the party. “The authorities are
not as stupid as they used to be,” said Yang. “If this happened in the past,
I would be a dead man, and my family would have been destroyed. But here I
am, still writing books and giving talks. The fact that I have not been sent
to prison in itself indicates there have been some changes.”

The last time I spoke with Yang Jisheng about Tombstone, he summed up China
and the party’s progress with words that stuck in my head. “The system is
decaying and the system is evolving,” he said. “It is decaying while it is
evolving. It is not clear what side might come out on top in the end.”

Richard McGregor is the FT’s deputy news editor. This article is an edited
extract from his new book ‘The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist
Rulers’ (Allen Lane, £25).

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6a148d26-74 ... df-87f5-00144feabdc0.html

Påminner mycket om sovjet

In two volumes, it gives a minutely chronicled and irrefutable account of the death by starvation of 35-40 million Chinese between 1958 and 1961. It details a tragedy the ruling Communist party has long sought to cover over.

Det finns en bok som redan kom 1997 där Jasper Becker skriver om den stora svälten som pågick då. Den heter "Hungry Ghosts - Mao's Secret Famine".

<h3>NY Times - Mao's Great Leap to Famine</h3>
<p>December 15, 2010<br />
By FRANK DIKÖTTER<br />
<br />
HONG KONG — The worst catastrophe in China’s history, and one of the worst<br />
anywhere, was the Great Famine of 1958 to 1962, and to this day the ruling<br />
Communist Party has not fully acknowledged the degree to which it was a<br />
direct result of the forcible herding of villagers into communes under the<br />
“Great Leap Forward” that Mao Zedong launched in 1958.</p>
<p>To this day, the party attempts to cover up the disaster, usually by<br />
blaming the weather. Yet detailed records of the horror exist in the<br />
party’s own national and local archives.</p>
<p>Access to these files would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago, but<br />
a quiet revolution has been taking place over the past few years as vast<br />
troves of documents have gradually been declassified. While the most<br />
sensitive information still remains locked up, researchers are being<br />
allowed for the first time to rummage through the dark night of the Maoist<br />
era.</p>
<p>From 2005 to 2009, I examined hundreds of documents all over China,<br />
traveling from subtropical Guangdong to arid Gansu Province near the<br />
deserts of Inner Mongolia.</p>
<p>The party records were usually housed on the local party committee<br />
premises, closely guarded by soldiers. Inside were acres of dusty,<br />
yellowing paper held together in folders that could contain anything from<br />
a single scrap of paper scribbled by a party secretary decades ago to<br />
neatly typewritten minutes of secret leadership meetings.</p>
<p>Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted<br />
in one of the world’s worst famines. Demographers have used official<br />
census figures to estimate that some 20 to 30 million people died.</p>
<p>But inside the archives is an abundance of evidence, from the minutes of<br />
emergency committees to secret police reports and public security<br />
investigations, that show these estimates to be woefully inadequate.</p>
<p>In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security<br />
Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local<br />
boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his<br />
province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees<br />
investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine,<br />
leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.</p>
<p>In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was<br />
responsible for at least 45 million deaths.</p>
<p>Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or<br />
summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of<br />
not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound<br />
and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included<br />
mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.</p>
<p>One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership —<br />
most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of<br />
his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone<br />
dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime:<br />
digging up a potato.</p>
<p>When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss,<br />
Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The<br />
report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969<br />
to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief<br />
three weeks later.</p>
<p>Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report<br />
shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to<br />
force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that<br />
“commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their<br />
death.”</p>
<p>As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously<br />
unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled,<br />
they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another.<br />
Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.</p>
<p>One police investigation from Feb. 25, 1960, details some 50 cases in<br />
Yaohejia village in Gansu: “Name of culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Name of<br />
victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with Culprit: Younger Brother. Manner of<br />
Crime: Killed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.”</p>
<p>The term “famine” tends to support the widespread view that the deaths<br />
were largely the result of half-baked and poorly executed economic<br />
programs. But the archives show that coercion, terror and violence were<br />
the foundation of the Great Leap Forward.</p>
<p>Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside,<br />
some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed<br />
for even greater extractions of food.</p>
<p>At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to<br />
procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever<br />
before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human<br />
loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is<br />
better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their<br />
fill.”</p>
<p>Mao’s Great Famine was not merely an isolated episode in the making of<br />
modern China. It was its turning point. The subsequent Cultural Revolution<br />
was the leader’s attempt to take revenge on the colleagues who had dared<br />
to oppose him during the Great Leap Forward.</p>
<p>To this day, there is little public information inside China about this<br />
dark past. Historians who are allowed to work in the party archives tend<br />
to publish their findings across the border in Hong Kong.</p>
<p>There is no museum, no monument, no remembrance day to honor the tens of<br />
millions of victims. Survivors, most of them in the countryside, are<br />
rarely given a voice, all too often taking their memories with them to<br />
their graves.</p>
<p>Frank Dikötter is a professor at the University of Hong Kong, on leave<br />
from the University of London. His books include “Mao’s Great Famine.”</p>
<p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/opi ... .html</a></p>