A new book about the Great Leap Forward has been published.  It’s in Chinese; the title is Mubei (Tombstone) and is written by Yang Jisheng.  I have not seen it myself yet but a review is available in yesterday’s (July 6th) South China Morning Post (no link available).   From the review: 

The two-volume, 1,100-page book is a meticulous account of the famine by someone who is particularly well qualified to write it. Yang Jisheng, now 67, joined the Communist Party in 1964, graduated in 1966 from the elite Tsinghua University and joined Xinhua, where he worked for 35 years before his retirement in 2001. He now works as a deputy editor of a Beijing magazine. The book was published in May by Cosmos Books of Hong Kong.

In the early 1990s, Yang began traveling the length and breadth of China to interview witnesses, eventually compiling more than 10 million words of records. His identity as a veteran reporter for the country’s top news agency gave him access to people, reports, statistics and historical documents that would have been denied to ordinary people.

Each chapter quotes dozens of notes and sources: Yang’s aim was to produce an account that is authoritative and can stand up to the challenge of official denial.

     It is very valuable to have this sort of record.  Too many people are unaware, or chose to forget or ignore, the details of the horrific man-made, Mao-made famine of the Great Leap:

Yang describes the result of these policies in Xinyang, in Henan province . In 1958, 1.2 million people in the district, one-third of the workforce, were employed in making steel.

In 1959, its grain output was 1.629 million tonnes, a drop of 46.1 per
cent on 1958: but the local government reported a crop of 3.21 million.

Based on these figures, the provincial government took 525,000 tonnes,
leaving the people in Xinyang with an average of 82kg of grain per head
for the whole year. With 17.5kg the average monthly consumption, the
grain ran out after four months.

As people began to die, those who remained ate whatever they could – mice, sparrows, grass, corn stalks, tree bark, cotton fibre, mussel shells and even heron droppings.

Lu Baoguo, a Xinhua reporter in Xinyang at the time, told Yang what he remembered.

     Mao knew what was happening; not in every detail but the reality of famine and starvation had been brought to his attention by Peng Dehuai in 1959.  And Mao chose to continue the wholly unnecessary deathly disaster.  There is no evidence that the Chairman himself ever experienced any food shortages.  He ate well, and kept to his inhumane ideology while people starved to death all throughout the country.  Reminds me of a passage from Mencius:

“There’s plenty of juicy meat in your kitchen and plenty of well-fed horses in your stable,” continued Mencius, “but the people here look hungry, in the countryside they’re starving to death.  You’re feeding humans to animals. Everyone hates to see animals eat each other, and an emperor is the people’s father and mother – but if his government feeds humans to animals, how can he claim to e the people’s father and mother?”

     Mencius means this figuratively: the effect of living well while others starve is like feeding humans to animals; the kings stables and barns have plenty of grain to feed the animals, while the people have none.  Food is taken from the people to support the emperor’s animals, his oxen and horses.  It is as if the people themselves were being devoured by the animals.  And it is in that sense that Mao, too, did something similar.  He took grain from starving people to feed his own megalomania, the animals of his personal egotism and power.  He was not a “true emperor,” Mencius’s designation for a just and humane leader.  He was a terrifying giant of inhumanity and cruelty.