TOMBSTONE: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

Abstract

Since Yang has written his monumental Tombstone more in the style of a journalistic report than an academic work, his book has not answered a certain number of questions with regard to the famine.

TOMBSTONE: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962. By Yang Jisheng; translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian; edited by Edward Friedman, Guo Jian and Stacy Mosher; introduction by Edward Friedman and Roderick MacFarquhar. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. xxvi, 629 pp. (Map, tables, figures.) US$35.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-374-27793-2.

The English translation of Tombstone, which retains fifteen of the twenty-eight chapters of the book's Chinese version, mostly those chapters examining various aspects of the Great Leap Forward Famine at the national level, explains the famine's effect from the perspective of the political centre. Leaving out the other thirteen chapters that largely recount provincial famine stories, the translation more cohesively represents Yang Jisheng's central argument: that Maoist totalitarianism was the basic reason for the thirty-six million deaths during the famine. In Yang's view, this totalitarianism, in combination with the Soviet-style autocracy and ancient Chinese despotism, and dominated by Mao Zedong's emperor type of dictatorial power, caused the greatest famine in human history as a result of its ruthless suppression of political dissenters in China and of different policy opinions within the Communist Party. Eventually, as Yang sees it, the political system, after criticizing, dismissing or imprisoning the officials at every level who had doubts about the Leap, was able to drive its entire body of cadres to frenziedly pursue Mao's industrialization targets, during which the cadres competitively exaggerated grain production to an absurdly high level, relentlessly pressed the peasants for the last bit of the so-called "surplus grain" for funding industrialization, strictly restrained food quotas distributed to the rural residents through commanding communal kitchens where hundreds of millions of these residents were force to dine, shamelessly or fearfully concealed local hunger reality, and heartlessly prevented the starving refugees from running away or practicing any other survival strategies. Yang obviously regards the catastrophe as "Mao's famine." In early 1959, as Yang's chapter "Turnaround in Lushan" recounts, Mao was aware of the grave consequences of his leap programs and ready to take "corrective measures." Yet, when he felt that defense minister Peng Deihuai's criticism of his erroneous polices, made at the Party's leadership meeting in Lushan in summer 1959, challenged his authority, Mao punished Peng and abandoned the corrective measures. The result of the continuation of the Leap was the death of tens of millions of people in 1959-61, for which Mao was ultimately responsible.

Tombstone's greatest contribution to the existing literature of the Great Leap famine is its detailed account of events, people, statistics and policies that took place during the famine. Before Yang's book, political scientists Roderick MacFarquhar, Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun wrote about how Mao and the central leadership took the road to the Great Leap disaster; economists Justin Lin, Gene Chang, James Wen, James Kung and political scientist Dali Yang debated over whether the communal dining or agricultural collectivization was the major cause of the famine; American and Chinese demographers estimated the Great Leap mortality; and journalist Jasper Becker reported on "Mao's secret famine" based on the stories he gained from a few Communist documents and from interviewing a number of Chinese villagers and famine survivors. Yet, due to the difficulty in accessing China's archives, none of the aforementioned people were able to write on the Great Leap events in a manner as genuine and persuasive as that offered by Yang.

Using his privilege as a senior reporter of China's state-run news agency, which permits him to read secret internal reports stored in archives and to interview Communist cadres at almost all levels and all walks of life, Yang spent two decades searching for source materials and talking to the officials who were in charge of some of the worst events during the leap or involved in the process of national economic planning or responsible for collection of the nation's population data. Supported by hundreds of original documents and a large number of memories of those officials, Tombstone records in the most authoritative manner the reality of the Great Leap famine, including not only several notorious major events such as the "Xingyang Incident" in Henan that resulted in the death of one million out of the Xingyang Prefecture's 8.5 million people but also many less-known events such as the "Bo County Tragedy" in Anhui that ended in the death of 200,000 of the county's 737,000 rural population. For decades scholars have tried to uncover, with only partial success, the terrible truths of the Great Leap famine, which the Chinese authorities have made every endeavor to cover up, and with Tombstone these truths are now made known to the world in the most reliable manner. Tombstone is unparalleled in the existing literature of the Great Leap famine. Although a few recent works on the famine have also been able to dig out some archives, none of them has been able to compare with Tombstone in terms of the scope of subject coverage and the depth of source materials.

One astounding reality Tombstone has revealed in unprecedented detail is how Mao and cadres at high levels evaded the responsibility of the famine. When terrible deaths occurred, Mao often laid the blame on landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries or bad elements because their alleged takeover of local political power had enabled evil events to take place, or on some local cadres who, in Mao's eyes, due to the decay of their revolutionary spirit, had become spokesmen for the landlord classes. As happened in the disastrous Xingyang Incident, grassroots cadres at the village, county and prefectural levels were the ones who took the blame, while Henan's provincial party secretary and Mao's policies remained intact.

Since Yang has written his monumental Tombstone more in the style of a journalistic report than an academic work, his book has not answered a certain number of questions with regard to the famine. One would wonder why there was a great discrepancy in mortality across provinces or across counties within a province, and this issue apparently cannot be interpreted solely by the fact of the oppression of totalitarianism because other factors such as natural conditions might have played a significant role. Similarly, one may also ask why mortality was drastically different across villages or even why in one village some peasants died of starvation while others survived. These questions call for further studies beyond Tombstone.