The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. CONTENTS Title Page Copyright Notice Map Introduction by Edward Friedman and Roderick MacFarquhar Translators’ Note A Chronology of the Great Famine An Everlasting Tombstone 1. The Epicenter of the Disaster 2. The Three Red Banners: Source of the Famine 3. Hard Times in Gansu 4. The People’s Commune: Foundation of the Totalitarian System 5. The Communal Kitchens 6. Hungry Ghosts in Heaven’s Pantry 7. The Ravages of the Five Winds 8. Anxious in Anhui 9. The Food Crisis 10. Turnaround in Lushan 11. China’s Population Loss in the Great Leap Forward 12. The Official Response to the Crisis 13. Social Stability During the Great Famine 14. The Systemic Causes of the Great Famine 15. The Great Famine’s Impact on Chinese Politics Notes Bibliography Index Copyright INTRODUCTION by EDWARD FRIEDMAN and RODERICK MACFARQUHAR Tombstone describes and analyzes the worst famine in human history, the disaster inflicted upon the Chinese people between 1958 and 1962. Author Yang Jisheng, a distinguished journalist by profession and an inspired investigator by avocation, wrote this book in part to expiate his shame for watching his father die of starvation in 1959 and not understanding the cause. At the time, Yang was loyally supporting the policies of the Great Leap Forward. Only thirty years later did he accept that the state system and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies were the direct cause of his father’s death. This book is about the murderous impact of the Great Leap policies and the CCP leaders who conceived them. Yang shows that the supreme leader, Mao Zedong, soon knew that his economically irrational policies were deadly. But Mao protected his power by reaffirming them against the few brave colleagues who questioned them. Had Mao continued to heed those criticisms, which he did briefly, the death toll would have been massively reduced. Tombstone is about a hierarchical authoritarian system of concentrated power in which every official is, as Yang puts it, a slave facing upward and a dictator facing downward. At the bottom of the system were the Chinese people, mostly farm households, who suffered under the murderous brutality of the lower-level officials, proving an iron law of bureaucracy: the pettier the bureaucrat, the harsher his rule. During the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath, CCP system harshness became murderousness: an incalculable number of Chinese chose to kill other Chinese. There were exceptions to that rule in famine-struck China, and Yang gives them their heroic due. For those officials, however, trying to save lives usually brought the end of their careers, often the loss of their freedom, and even the end of their lives. Most of this book depicts the fate of the tens of millions of people like Yang’s father who died during the famine. Yang’s estimate is at least 36 million, somewhere between the 28 to 30 million estimated early on by demographers, the 42 to 43 million arrived at by an official fact-finding mission in the early 1980s, and the 45 million plus in one recent scholarly analysis. All the estimates of the innocent dead are mind-boggling. It is the strength of Yang’s investigation that makes the statistics come alive as people confront death by a system and its policies. He also exposes horrific survival choices: to keep one child alive by starving the others; to eat a recently dead relative or even to dig up a corpse from a grave; to desert one’s family and flee to another province knowing this could lead the local CCP to kill one’s family members; to protect oneself by informing on one’s neighbors; to sell oneself to an official for a few scraps from his table (because, for officialdom, there was always plenty to eat). Yang helps us feel the anguish of immoral options. What is extraordinary about the famine figures is not just their size but that, whichever figure is correct, this system, its leader, and his policies killed even more Chinese than did the brutal Imperial Japanese Army during the Sino- Japanese War of 1937–45. This is not an easy fact for patriotic Chinese to swallow. The pathbreaking work of Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has shown that famines are not necessarily the result of lack of food. But the argument that lack of information about shortages is often a cause does not apply in this case. While junior officials did falsify data to benefit their own careers, Mao had enough reports from senior colleagues to know that his policy of extracting an increasing percentage of grain from the countryside was causing millions of deaths. The lives of Chinese villagers in the tens of millions were sacrificed in the interest of other policy objectives, including Mao’s own retention of power. Yang’s history builds on solid recent Chinese scholarship that has been published in China. Tombstone, however, is banned in China, perhaps because Yang’s material makes clear the culpability of the Chairman, his colleagues, his party, and their system that caused tens of millions of deaths. Perhaps also the authorities were appalled at the extent of Yang’s vivid documentation of the killing. This was not just one man’s history. Yang got people who experienced the famine to describe it in their own words. He found local journalists who’d witnessed and reported on murders and starvation and got them to write their memoirs. He located and interviewed local implementers of the fatal policies. He got surviving resisters to recount their experiences. Using his privileged status as a high-ranking journalist, Yang culled dozens of archives throughout the country that contained contemporary secret party reports of the impact of the famine and the summary manner in which officials had ordered the killing of resisters. This English version highlights the voices that Yang alone sought out and captured so that the murderous impact of the Great Leap Forward could be experienced in the words and feelings of the survivors. Yang’s two-volume masterpiece was originally published in 2008 in Hong Kong, running to 1,200 pages in Chinese and reprinted eight times in two years. The highly qualified Stacy Mosher translated the whole work. Guo Jian, wonderfully comfortable in the argot of both Chinese and American cultures, then polished the translation. Finally, Edward Friedman, a specialist on the politics of rural China, assisted the translators in condensing and editing the manuscript. Yang invited Friedman and Harvard’s specialist on Chinese elite politics, Roderick MacFarquhar, to write this preface to introduce the book to an English-reading audience. TRANSLATORS’ NOTE As translators, we faced two major and interrelated challenges: the length of Yang Jisheng’s monumental work and the ordering of its chapters. The original Chinese version of Tombstone totaled more than 800,000 Chinese characters and was published in two volumes totaling more than 1,200 pages. Recognizing that in today’s media environment no one would publish a translated work of that length, Mr. Yang reduced the Chinese version to something over 500,000 characters. We initially translated this version, but were advised that it was still an impractical length. With the assistance of our colleague Edward Friedman, and with Mr. Yang’s permission, we edited the book down to the version presented here. Our primary goal was to preserve the essence of Mr. Yang’s work in all respects—a representative sampling of his comprehensive coverage and the bulk of his analysis and reflections on this epic tragedy. We hope we’ve produced an edition of Tombstone that is accessible to a general reader while also enlightening to scholars and specialists. In the initial process of reducing the length of Tombstone, Mr. Yang proposed reordering the chapters for a non-Chinese audience. In the original two-volume work, the first volume is largely microscopic, examining the calamity as it affected individual provinces all the way down to the grassroots level, while the second volume, macroscopic in design, covers the nationwide agricultural collectivization movement and analyzes the political system that was ultimately responsible for the disaster. Since the early chapters in the second volume could serve as an introduction to the overall situation of the famine, Mr. Yang considered starting the book with these chapters to better prepare Western readers for the provincial chapters. In discussions among ourselves and with others, however, we found that placing the macroscopic “policy” chapters first reduced the drama and impact of the human stories that consequently followed much later in the book. The consensus we reached was that Mr. Yang’s initial instinct as a veteran journalist had been the best: that is, first to present the tragedy in all its horror so the reader comprehended the need to explore how the system and its practitioners brought about the disaster. We therefore arrived at a compromise: we have begun the book, as in Mr. Yang’s original Chinese version, with the chapter on Henan and the Xinyang tragedy, but rather than presenting the rest of the provincial chapters together in a block, we have alternated them with policy chapters that are particularly relevant to the conditions of each province. The book presented here consists of four of the original fourteen “provincial” chapters, the six “central,” or “policy,” chapters, and five (instead of eight) “analysis” chapters. In addition to Edward Friedman’s invaluable and multipronged effort to ensure the publication of Mr. Yang’s book in English, we are indebted to a number of other people whose assistance was essential. We would particularly like to thank the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College and its director, Minxin Pei, for their vital support as the host institution for this project. We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and a generous anonymous donor who funded the lengthy translation process. We thank the translator of Tombstone’s French edition, Louis Vincenolles, for collegial and helpful exchanges, and Nancy Hearst, librarian for the Fairbank Center Collection of Harvard University’s H. C. Fung Library, for an expert reading that saved us from many lapses. Most of all, we thank Mr. Yang Jisheng for the honor of allowing us to translate his great work and for his patient replies to our many queries.