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The Dissident WithinWhat a book about China's great famine says about the country's transformation.
By Anne ApplebaumPosted Monday, Aug. 11, 2008, at 7:52 PM ET
Cymbals clashed; a giant scroll unfurled. There were fireworks, kites, ancient soldiers marching in formation, modern dancers bending their bodies into impossible shapes, astronauts, puppets, little children, multiple high-tech gizmos. The Olympic opening ceremony showed you China as China wants you to see it.
But for a deeper understanding of how far China has come—and of how odd its transformation continues to be—switch off the Olympics. Instead, spend a few minutes contemplating the existence of a new book, Tombstone. It is the first proper history of China's great famine, a catastrophe partly engineered by the Chinese Communist Party and its first leader, Mao Zedong.
"It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book," writes the author, Yang Jisheng, in the opening paragraph.
Tombstone has not been translated. Nevertheless, rumors of its contents and short excerpts are already ricocheting around the world. (I first learned of it in California, from an excited Australian historian.) Based on a decade's worth of interviews, and unprecedented access to documents and statistics, Tombstone—in two volumes and 1,100 pages—establishes beyond any doubt that China's misguided charge toward industrialization—Mao's "Great Leap Forward"—was an utter disaster.
A combination of criminally bad policies (farmers were forced to make steel instead of growing crops; peasants were forced into unproductive communes) and official cruelty (China was grimly exporting grain at the time) created, between 1959 and 1961, one of the worst famines in recorded history. "I went to one village and saw 100 corpses," one witness told Yang. "Then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people."
So thorough is his documentation, apparently, that some are already calling Yang "China's Solzhenitsyn," in honor of the Russian dissident who probably did the most to expose the crimes of Stalin—and who died last week. But the comparison is not quite right. Yang is not a dissident, but a longtime Communist Party member. For more than three decades, he was a reporter for Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. As a result, he had privileged access to party documents, which no one else has ever had before.
More to the point, he is not an outsider: On the contrary, he, his book, and the story of the famine itself have a strange, hard-to-define status in China. Though the book is banned on the mainland, it was published in Hong Kong, where it sold out immediately. At the same time, while the famine officially doesn't exist—Chinese history textbooks speak of "three years of natural disasters," not of a mass artificial famine caused by Chairman Mao—many people clearly remember it well, fully understand Mao's role in what happened, and are willing to discuss it openly.
Like the Communist legacy itself, the famine exists in a kind of limbo: undiscussed, unacknowledged, yet a vivid part of popular memory. Because China is no longer a totalitarian country, merely an authoritarian one, a journalist like Yang could spend 10 years working on the history of the famine, openly soliciting interviews and documents. But because the Chinese Communist Party neither openly embraces nor openly rejects the legacy of Mao—his name was not mentioned during the Olympics opening ceremony—there is no public discussion or debate.
It's not hard to understand why not. If the Chinese Communist Party were to present an honest version of its own past, its own legitimacy might also come into question. Why, exactly, does a party with a history drenched in blood and suffering enjoy a monopoly on political power in China? Why does a nominally Marxist party, one whose economic theories proved utterly bankrupt in the past, still preside over an explosively capitalist society? Because there aren't any good answers to those questions, it's in the Chinese leadership's interest to make sure they don't get asked.
The Dissident Within:What a book about China's great famine says about the country's transformation.
Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book isGulag: A History.
COMMENTS
Remarks from the Fray:
Anne Applebaum misunderstands a fundamental point about modern China: It is ruled by Mao's opponents, not his followers. After Mao's death, there was a power struggle between Mao's opponents, led by Deng Xiaoping, and Mao's supporters, led by his widow and several of Mao's friends. Mao's opponents won; Deng Xiaoping became the new leader of China and changed the economic system back to capitalism; and Mao's widow and friends were labeled the "Gang of Four" and thrown in prison for their roles in the Cultural Revolution and other Mao-era fiascos.
The current Chinese leadership is overwhelmingly dominated by people who regard Mao's last decades as full of disastrous mistakes. That being the case, why is it still taboo to openly discuss failed policies such as the "Great Leap Forward"? The reason is simple -- China's ruling elite is anti-Mao, but China also has hundreds of millions of peasants who have a much more positive view of Mao. To many of China's peasants -- and peasants are still the bulk of the population -- Mao is a beloved figure who united China, stopping the endless battles between rival war lords and repelling the Japanese invaders. They also remember Mao as the man who made education and medical care available to the majority of the Chinese people for the first time in China's long history, and who (apart from the disastrous years of the "Great Leap Forward") managed to provide adequate food for China for the first time in about 150 years. (Yes, there was a terrible famine during Mao's reign, but before Mao took power, there was pretty much ALWAYS a famine going on somewhere in China.)
So, Mao is a tremendously divisive figure in China -- the elites generally think he was crazy, but many of the common people view him as a sort of god. In East Asian societies, there is only one way to cope with intense disagreement -- you pretend it doesn't exist. And so, the Chinese government doesn't talk about Mao, but for the exact opposite reason of what most Americans assume. It's not that the government is pro-Mao and the general Chinese population is anti-Mao; it's that the current government is anti-Mao, and the general population is largely pro-Mao.
If China's current political leaders are thoroughly discredited by their continuing ties to Mao and the mass-homicidal legacy, why encourage Western companies to do business there? Especially when today's labor practices often eerily mimic those of a slave labor camp society. Maybe what Ms. Applebaum needs to do is to question her naive absolute juxtaposition between authoritarian capitalism and totalitarian communism; maybe she needs to acknowledge that the two systems can actually work together in a synthesis of exploitation of the weak by the powerful.
Is a translator lined up for Yang Jisheng's Tombstone? I am told that a Wen Huang has undertaken a translation of Yang Xianhau's Farewell to Jiabiangou, another eye-popping account (thinly fictionalized) of the Great Leap Famine. Yang Xianhau has also written Chronicle of Ding Xi Oprhanage and Chronicle of Jiabiangou, though I am not aware that a translator has been engaged for these works.
So perhaps the dam of silence is beginning to break on this epochal subject.
Here's the uncomfortable question: We in the West thought that it would not be possible to have healthy dealings with post-war Germany unless its political leadership had been entirely de-nazified. How sensible is it to expect good future relations with a government that refuses to confront the Great Leap Famine?
The Chinese (and their leaders) have a unique strength in that they seem to be able to hold two directly contrary ideas in their heads at the same time: they understand that awfulness brought on by Mao and his cronies, but because they fear the awfulness of the cataclysm that would occur if the Communist party were somehow violently overthrown (or even non-violently - who wants to end up like Russia?) they are willing to support the Communist dictatorship as long as it continues to deliver increased material well-being that the policies initiated by Deng Xiaoping have wrought.
It is probably no coincidence that a re-evaluation has taken place regarding failed KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek, who after all, was attempting to create the kind of society the communists have inadvertently created after defeating him - Confucian, capitalist, prosperous, and relatively open, but controlled by a single party. The Communists are the true heirs to Chiang Kai-shek, and Chiang, who never started a famine that killed 30 million people, has started to look relatively good. But don't expect the government's Xinhua News Agency to go on record saying that.
Which brings us to the other great issue that the Chinese are able to simultaneously hold contradictory thoughts about - that Taiwan is an integral part of China on the one hand, while being obviously de facto independent at the same time. By not addressing this obvious contradiction head on, the Chinese on both sides of the Strait are buying themselves time until the day when - hopefully - China and Taiwan can unite and the and the mainland evolves into a Singaporean-style quasi Democracy.
The Chinese are almost certainly right to take this practical attitude towards otherwise insoluble problems. If fact, it is a tribute to the genius of the Chinese people they can do so - I only wish that other peoples with insoluble problems could take such an attitude. As Thomas Friedman pointed out a few years ago, the leaders of the Palestinians and their backers would do much better to accept a 'temporary' compromise such as has been on offer for decades, instead of continuing to stoke a suicidal, unwinnable, fratricidal, and endless war with Israel. This attitude can lead nowhere except the hopeless morass that continues to this day. Across the Taiwan Strait, at least, there is plenty of basis for hope.
I was born in the middle of 1960s in China. When I was a teenager in early late 1970s, my parents told me their own experience during the great famine. They described people developing edema due to malnutrition. During the years I studied in college, I read multiple in depth articles in magazines revealing the real cause of the famine. I realized that it had almost nothing to do with natural disasters. Just like Post-Stalin Soviet government criticized Stalin, the post-Mao Chinese government allowed and propelled much of the reexamination of Mao's legacy. That was more than twenty years ago. When I moved to US in 1989, I pretty much knew everything about China's post1949 history. In the years living in US, I have not learned anything new about post 1949 China history.
Cymbals clashed; a giant scroll unfurled. There were fireworks, kites, ancient soldiers marching in formation, modern dancers bending their bodies into impossible shapes, astronauts, puppets, little children, multiple high-tech gizmos. The Olympic opening ceremony showed you China as China wants you to see it. 
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Remarks from the Fray:
Anne Applebaum misunderstands a fundamental point about modern China: It is ruled by Mao's opponents, not his followers. After Mao's death, there was a power struggle between Mao's opponents, led by Deng Xiaoping, and Mao's supporters, led by his widow and several of Mao's friends. Mao's opponents won; Deng Xiaoping became the new leader of China and changed the economic system back to capitalism; and Mao's widow and friends were labeled the "Gang of Four" and thrown in prison for their roles in the Cultural Revolution and other Mao-era fiascos.
The current Chinese leadership is overwhelmingly dominated by people who regard Mao's last decades as full of disastrous mistakes. That being the case, why is it still taboo to openly discuss failed policies such as the "Great Leap Forward"? The reason is simple -- China's ruling elite is anti-Mao, but China also has hundreds of millions of peasants who have a much more positive view of Mao. To many of China's peasants -- and peasants are still the bulk of the population -- Mao is a beloved figure who united China, stopping the endless battles between rival war lords and repelling the Japanese invaders. They also remember Mao as the man who made education and medical care available to the majority of the Chinese people for the first time in China's long history, and who (apart from the disastrous years of the "Great Leap Forward") managed to provide adequate food for China for the first time in about 150 years. (Yes, there was a terrible famine during Mao's reign, but before Mao took power, there was pretty much ALWAYS a famine going on somewhere in China.)
So, Mao is a tremendously divisive figure in China -- the elites generally think he was crazy, but many of the common people view him as a sort of god. In East Asian societies, there is only one way to cope with intense disagreement -- you pretend it doesn't exist. And so, the Chinese government doesn't talk about Mao, but for the exact opposite reason of what most Americans assume. It's not that the government is pro-Mao and the general Chinese population is anti-Mao; it's that the current government is anti-Mao, and the general population is largely pro-Mao.
--JudithS
(To reply, click here.)
If China's current political leaders are thoroughly discredited by their continuing ties to Mao and the mass-homicidal legacy, why encourage Western companies to do business there? Especially when today's labor practices often eerily mimic those of a slave labor camp society. Maybe what Ms. Applebaum needs to do is to question her naive absolute juxtaposition between authoritarian capitalism and totalitarian communism; maybe she needs to acknowledge that the two systems can actually work together in a synthesis of exploitation of the weak by the powerful.
--MarkEHaag
(To reply, click here.)
Is a translator lined up for Yang Jisheng's Tombstone? I am told that a Wen Huang has undertaken a translation of Yang Xianhau's Farewell to Jiabiangou, another eye-popping account (thinly fictionalized) of the Great Leap Famine. Yang Xianhau has also written Chronicle of Ding Xi Oprhanage and Chronicle of Jiabiangou, though I am not aware that a translator has been engaged for these works.
So perhaps the dam of silence is beginning to break on this epochal subject.
Here's the uncomfortable question: We in the West thought that it would not be possible to have healthy dealings with post-war Germany unless its political leadership had been entirely de-nazified. How sensible is it to expect good future relations with a government that refuses to confront the Great Leap Famine?
--Voltairean
(To reply, click here.)
The Chinese (and their leaders) have a unique strength in that they seem to be able to hold two directly contrary ideas in their heads at the same time: they understand that awfulness brought on by Mao and his cronies, but because they fear the awfulness of the cataclysm that would occur if the Communist party were somehow violently overthrown (or even non-violently - who wants to end up like Russia?) they are willing to support the Communist dictatorship as long as it continues to deliver increased material well-being that the policies initiated by Deng Xiaoping have wrought.
It is probably no coincidence that a re-evaluation has taken place regarding failed KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek, who after all, was attempting to create the kind of society the communists have inadvertently created after defeating him - Confucian, capitalist, prosperous, and relatively open, but controlled by a single party. The Communists are the true heirs to Chiang Kai-shek, and Chiang, who never started a famine that killed 30 million people, has started to look relatively good. But don't expect the government's Xinhua News Agency to go on record saying that.
Which brings us to the other great issue that the Chinese are able to simultaneously hold contradictory thoughts about - that Taiwan is an integral part of China on the one hand, while being obviously de facto independent at the same time. By not addressing this obvious contradiction head on, the Chinese on both sides of the Strait are buying themselves time until the day when - hopefully - China and Taiwan can unite and the and the mainland evolves into a Singaporean-style quasi Democracy.
The Chinese are almost certainly right to take this practical attitude towards otherwise insoluble problems. If fact, it is a tribute to the genius of the Chinese people they can do so - I only wish that other peoples with insoluble problems could take such an attitude. As Thomas Friedman pointed out a few years ago, the leaders of the Palestinians and their backers would do much better to accept a 'temporary' compromise such as has been on offer for decades, instead of continuing to stoke a suicidal, unwinnable, fratricidal, and endless war with Israel. This attitude can lead nowhere except the hopeless morass that continues to this day. Across the Taiwan Strait, at least, there is plenty of basis for hope.
--freetrader
(To reply, click here.)
I was born in the middle of 1960s in China. When I was a teenager in early late 1970s, my parents told me their own experience during the great famine. They described people developing edema due to malnutrition. During the years I studied in college, I read multiple in depth articles in magazines revealing the real cause of the famine. I realized that it had almost nothing to do with natural disasters. Just like Post-Stalin Soviet government criticized Stalin, the post-Mao Chinese government allowed and propelled much of the reexamination of Mao's legacy. That was more than twenty years ago. When I moved to US in 1989, I pretty much knew everything about China's post1949 history. In the years living in US, I have not learned anything new about post 1949 China history.
--LLWu
(To reply, click here.)
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