Yang Jisheng
Autor von Grabstein - Mùbei: Die große chinesische Hungerkatastrophe 1958-1962
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Wissenswertes
- Geburtstag
- 1940-11
- Geschlecht
- male
- Nationalität
- China
- Geburtsort
- Xian de Xishui
- Ausbildung
- Université de Qinghua (Diplôme, 19 66)
- Berufe
- Journaliste
Historien - Organisationen
- Annales chinoises (Rédacteur en chef)
Chine Nouvelle, Agence de presse (Journaliste, 19 66 | 20 01)
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Originally published in Chinese, the English translation has been cut in half. It is nevertheless a dense, wide-reaching work of demographic history. The book mostly focuses on decisions made at national party congresses, particularly the Lushan Conference. It also gets into details from local and provincial cadres officials who were obsessed with placating national leaders. There are some heart-rending, but not many, details from people who suffered through the famine based on interviews Yang conducted over the course of many years.
Yang adds very important context to the Great Famine. He shows evidence that there were many people within the state apparatus who tried to report the problems of the Great Leap Forward to national leaders. In fact, Mao and other top leaders in China knew that mass starvation was taking place as early as 1959, but they insisted that their political initiatives were more important, so they continued with intense grain procurement, communes, and political persecutions.
In editing the original Chinese, I think the translators and editors may have cut out a lot of the organizational text. Chapters are disjointed. They seem more like separate essays than a piece of a larger work.
Tombstone is similar to Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine and Jasper Becker's Hungry Ghosts. All three books show that the Great Famine was avoidable, but Yang makes the best case that it was malicious, perhaps even purposeful.
All three books try to use demographic changes to make sense of the tragedy, placing death tolls between 20 and 35 million. As far as I know, Tombstone is the only book from a Chinese historian that exhausts available records to make sense of the tragedy.… (mehr)