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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...