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Yang Jisheng (b. 1941?1) is a Chinese journalist and author of Tombstone (墓碑, Mubei), a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward. Yang joined the Communist Party in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until his retirement in 2001. As of 2008, he was the deputy editor of a news magazine in Beijing.1
Beginning in the early 1990s, Yang began interviewing people and collecting records of The Great Famine of 1959-1961, in which his own father had died, eventually accumulating ten million words of records. He published a a two-volume 1,100 page account of the period, in which he meticulously cited his sources to prevent the Chinese government from dismissing it. It was widely acclaimed as being the authoritative account of the Great Famine.12 He begins the book,
I call this book Tombstone. 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.1
The book, not yet translated from Chinese, was published in Hong Kong and is banned in mainland China.2
Yang Jisheng is also listed as a Fellow of China Media Project, a department under Hong Kong University
Anna Applebaum of The Washington Post wrote:
| “ | 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 recorded history. "I went to one village and saw 100 corpses," one witness told Yang. Then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people. 3 | ” |
Published works
- 墓碑 －－中國六十年代大饑荒紀實 (Mu Bei - - Zhong Guo Liu Shi Nian Dai Da Ji Huang Ji Shi), Hong Kong: Cosmos Books (Tian Di Tu Shu), 2008, ISBN 9789882119093
References
- ^ a b c d "A hunger for the truth: A new book, banned on the mainland, is becoming the definitive account of the Great Famine.", chinaelections.org, 7 July 2008
- ^ a b "When China Starved" by Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post, August 12, 2008
- ^ "When China Starved", The Washington Post (August 12, 2008). Retrieved on 3 November 2008.
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