A Grim Chronicle Of China's Great Famine
November 10, 2012 Louisa Lim
First of two parts
It's not often that a book comes out that rewrites a country's history. But that's the case with Tombstone, which was written by a retired Chinese reporter who spent 10 years secretly collecting official evidence about the country's devastating great famine. The famine, which began in the late 1950s, resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese.
For Yang Jisheng, now 72, the famine hit home while he was away. He was 18, busy preparing a newspaper for his boarding school's Communist Youth League, when a childhood friend burst into the room and said: "Your father is starving to death."
Yang rushed home to find a ghost town — no dogs, no chickens, even the elm tree outside his house was stripped of bark, which had been eaten.
....
Read more at: https://www.npr.org/2012/11/10/164732497/a-grim-chronicle-of-chinas-great-famine
* I'm not sure if "part II" of this article is linked in the NPR article.
China's Great Famine: A mission to expose the truth
An economist who survived one of the greatest man-made tragedies is determined to reveal how policies killed millions.
Allison Griner 11 Jan 2016
Sparrows were in short supply that summer, which meant that locusts were abundant. Mao Yushi would go to the fields, catch them and eat them. He had no choice. His stomach compelled him.
More than half a century has passed since Mao felt that intolerable hunger gnawing at his mind, driving his actions. China has changed a lot since then. It has grown more prosperous, with food waste now rivalling food security as a threat to the country's welfare.
"China has become a different country, a new China," said Mao, 86, from his apartment in Beijing. But even as the world transformed around him, Mao's mind could never quite escape the memory of one year: 1960.
Read more at: https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/ajeats/2016/01/china-great-famine-mission-expose-truth-160106100552321.html
Apparently, China has had a number of famines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China though, perhaps from seeing these articles, the "Great Leap Forward" era famine under Mao was the worse.
Guardian piece on same book as the first posted article.
China's Great Famine: the true story
The famine that killed up to 45 million people remains a taboo subject in China 50 years on. Author Yang Jisheng is determined to change that with his book, Tombstone
Yang Jisheng ... 'He comes across as a sweet old man, but he has a core of steel.' Photograph: Adam Dean/Panos
Small and stocky, neat in dress and mild of feature, Yang Jisheng is an unassuming figure as he bustles through the pleasantly shabby offices, an old-fashioned satchel thrown over one shoulder. Since his retirement from China's state news agency he has worked at the innocuously titled Annals of the Yellow Emperor journal, where stacks of documents cover chipped desks and a cockroach circles our paper cups of green tea.
Yet the horror stories penned by the 72-year-old from this comforting, professorial warren in Beijing are so savage and excessive they could almost be taken as the blackest of comedies; the bleakest of farces; the most extreme of satires on fanaticism and tyranny.
A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village's 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.
Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone
What Imperial Japan did to China and other nations is obviously, unforgivable but I read articles like this and other things the Communist government did. It has to be along the same lines of awful.
They say that actually, the Emperor and what Chiang-Kai-Shek, unfortunately did as well, was of the worst nature too. Something to research.
More:
https://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/great-chinese-famine/More:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/
