Jisheng Yang

Jian Guo

Stacy Mosher

'I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my father who died of starvation in 1959, for the thirty-six million Chinese who also starved to death, for the system that brought about their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book.' In one of the 20th Century's most nightmarish events, an estimated thirty-six million men, women and children were killed by starvation or physical abuse from 1958 to 1961 during China's Great Leap Forward. More people died in Mao's Great Famine than in the entire First World War, yet the Communist Party continues to deny it was anything more than 'three years of natural disaster'. This official concealment and what Yang Jisheng calls 'historical amnesia imposed by those in power' mean one of the most harrowing and dramatic chapters of human history has remained substantially untold, even among the victims and their families, until now. Tombstone is Yang Jisheng's challenge to this eradication of memory by totalitarianism. As a journalist and Communist Party insider, with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, he has at last uncovered the true scale of the staggering human cost of this tragedy. Based on a vast array of new sources and personal testimonies taken over many years, Tombstone is as significant and powerful a work as Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. It remains banned in China, but its publication in English serves as a memorial to the lives lost - an enduring tombstone to the memory of the dead - and as a hopeful anticipation of the final demise of the totalitarian system.

The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine

Tombstone

Guo Jian

Over the course of 66 days in 1967, more than 9,000 Chinese "class enemies" - including young children and the elderly - were murdered in Dao, a county in the Hunan province. Commonly known as the Daoxian massacre, the killings were one of the many acts of mass violence and radicalism thatrocked China during the Cultural Revolution. However, in spite of the scope and brutality of the killings, there are few detailed accounts of what took place on the ground. Years after the massacre, writer and editor Tan Hecheng was sent to Dao to report on the official investigation into the killings. Unable to publish his findings in China, in The Killing Wind he provides a first-hand investigation of the atrocities, exploring how and why the massacre took place. Tanblends his research with the recollections of survivors, offering a vivid account of the massacre and its aftermath. Dispelling much of Mao Zedong's mythos of peasant revolution, Tan reveals that the killings were unprovoked, and carried out with stomach-churning brutality. Far from the tyrannicallandlords depicted in revolutionary propaganda, most of the victims were hard-working, peaceful people who were technically considered part of the rural middle class. Other victims were peasants themselves, targeted because they had offended their killers in political or financial disputes. More than a catalog of horrors, Tan also offers a poignant meditation on memory, moral culpability, and the failure of the Chinese government to come to terms with the crimes of the Maoist era. By painting a detailed portrait of the massacres, The Killing Wind makes a broader argument about the longterm consequences of one of the twentieth century's greatest human tragedies. A compelling testament to the victims and survivors of the Daoxian massacre, The Killing Wind is a monument to historical truth, one that fills an immense gap in our understanding of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, and thestatus of truth in contemporary China.

Stacy Mosher

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