Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead

Comments (78)

In the era whose secret he uncovered, a journalist's office would have looked just like the one where Yang Jisheng works now. The tiled floor, the grimy window panes, the desk piled two feet high with papers, envelopes and books. The Mao-era radiators. The cigarette ash and the dust.

Under Mao Zedong, Yang's good fortune was to find a job as a reporter with China's state-run Xinhua news agency. His misfortune had been to see his father die of hunger in 1961, at the height of the famine that killed an estimated 36 million people:
"When my dad died, I thought it was just my family's problem. I blamed myself because I hadn't gone back home to pick wild plants to feed my dad. Later on, the governor of Hubei province said millions of people had died. I was astonished," Yang says.
In the 1990s Yang, by now a senior editor at Xinhua, used his status to secretly research the truth about the famine in 12 different provincial archives:
"I could not say I was looking for data about the famine, I could only say I was looking for data about the history of China's agriculture policy. In the data, I found a lot of information about the famine, and people who starved from it. Some of the libraries allowed me to take photocopies; some only let me write the information down. These," he gestures casually at a teetering pile of brown envelopes on the floor, "are the photocopies".

Chinese communists launched the Great Leap Forward campaign under Mao Zedong's leadership

The result was Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine, published in the West this year to high acclaim.
Yang, aged 72, is neat, small, swaddled in two jumpers despite the shafts of winter sunlight that stream across his desk. He is rummaging through his shelves on the hunt for a book whose title is important: by a Western author whose name has slipped his mind.
"Something about slavery?" he says. I try the name Hayek and after a bit of transliteration it works. He had stumbled on Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in a library and chuckles with mild scepticism when I tell him it is probably the most influential book in Western economics:
"Before I read Hayek, I had only read works the party wanted me to. Hayek says that to use the state to promote a utopia is very dangerous. In China that's exactly what they did. The utopia promoted by Marx, even though it is beautiful, it is very dangerous."
Even now, 50 years on, Chinese official history insists the famine of 1958-61 was a natural disaster. Yang's work demonstrates the famine's massive scale and its direct, political causes.
Agriculture was brutally collectivised, leaving peasants dependent on centrally distributed grain. Local cadres ordered the forced pooling of family kitchens, confiscating all ladles and punishing those who kept private food supplies.
Then, as Mao ordered rapid industrialisation during the Great Leap Forward, the grain supplies disappeared. Simultaneously local officials, terrified of failure, began to report fictional bumper harvests. Mao, meanwhile, publicly humiliated any party leader who voiced doubts. The result was the greatest famine in modern history.
It is Yang's refusal to duck the parallels with today that make his book unpublishable in mainland China. The famine happened because the party was all-powerful, he argues - just as numerous disasters visited on China by today's leaders - from the HIV-infected blood selling scandal, to the spread of Sars, to the shoddy buildings that collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake - are the result of unfree politics and an unfree press.
Despite its samizdat status, Yang thinks there may be around half a million copies of the Hong Kong edition circulating in China. His own copy, discreetly kept in a cupboard, is a black-market version of the latter: its pages are photocopied, its binding stiff, shiny and amateur.

“Start Quote

We learn a lot about history. However, most of it is fake. It is full of made up stories to meet the needs of ideology. Once you realise you've been cheated, you'll begin to pursue the truth. ”

Yang Jisheng

"It is estimated that there are about 100,000 of these knock off copies in circulation," he says. "People try to bring the real ones from Hong Kong but they get confiscated, so they make these. The response is very strong, I have received lots of letters from readers telling me the stories of relatives who died from the famine."
The English language version has made a massive impact, with some calling Yang the Chinese Solzhenitsyn. To me, however, he seems more like the Chinese equivalent of Vasily Grossman: though he believes Marxism is a dangerous fantasy he remains a party member. His haunting prose - like Grossman's - defends the power of memory:
"China has undergone an enormous transformation. But… the abuses under the exclusive profit orientation of a market economy and the untrammelled power of totalitarianism have created an endless supply of injustice, exacerbating discontent among the lower class majority. In this new century I believe that rulers and ordinary citizens alike know in their hearts that the totalitarian system has reached its end." (Tombstone, p22)
What is it like, I ask, to be an historian in a country where historical memory is so completely suppressed?
"Very painful," he says. "We learn a lot about history. However, most of it is fake. It is full of made-up stories to meet the needs of ideology. Once you realise you've been cheated, you'll begin to pursue the truth. That's what I did: I've been cheated, so I want to write the truth - however risky it is."
Though retired from Xinhua, Yang is still active. The small political magazine he runs out of this tiny office seems, from piles of unsold copies stacked up in the corridors, not massively influential. He thinks it will take 10 years to publish Tombstone in the People's Republic, if the political reform process keeps to its current glacial pace.
But like all dissident writers in China, he has learned not to hurry.
He pinches green tea leaves for me into a paper cup, and pours hot water from a flask. There is a barely-touched and ancient computer in one corner of the room, but Yang's conquest has been made in the world of analogue information: photocopies and scribbled notes.
He pats the English edition contentedly, still stunned by the price the publishers Penguin are charging for each one:
"Tombstone has four layers of meaning. The first is for my father who died in the famine, another is to remember the 36 million people who died during the famine. The third layer is a tombstone for the system that killed them."
And the fourth?
"The fourth is - the book has put me at political risk, so it's a tombstone for myself if anything happens to me because of writing it."
See Paul Mason's report on Yang Jisheng and other writers whose work is banned in China, on Newsnight Wednesday 21 November at 2230 on BBC Two, then afterwards on the BBC iPlayer.

Source

South Pacific Sandy Island 'proven not to exist'

Cartographers everywhere are now rushing to undiscover Sandy Island for ever

Continue reading the main story

Related Stories

• Australia plans Coral Sea reserve

A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say.

The supposedly sizeable strip of land, named Sandy Island on Google maps, was positioned midway between Australia and French-governed New Caledonia.
But when scientists from the University of Sydney went to the area, they found only the blue ocean of the Coral Sea.
The phantom island has featured in publications for at least a decade.
Scientist Maria Seton, who was on the ship, said that the team was expecting land, not 1,400m (4,620ft) of deep ocean.
"We wanted to check it out because the navigation charts on board the ship showed a water depth of 1,400m in that area - very deep," Dr Seton, from the University of Sydney, told the AFP news agency after the 25-day voyage.
"It's on Google Earth and other maps so we went to check and there was no island. We're really puzzled. It's quite bizarre.

"How did it find its way onto the maps? We just don't know, but we plan to follow up and find out."
Australian newspapers have reported that the invisible island would sit within French territorial waters if it existed - but does not feature on French government maps.
Australia's Hydrographic Service, which produces the country's nautical charts, says its appearance on some scientific maps and Google Earth could just be the result of human error, repeated down the years.
A spokesman from the service told Australian newspapers that while some map makers intentionally include phantom streets to prevent copyright infringements, that was was not usually the case with nautical charts because it would reduce confidence in them.
A spokesman for Google said they consult a variety of authoritative sources when making their maps.
"The world is a constantly changing place, the Google spokesman told AFP, "and keeping on top of these changes is a never-ending endeavour'.'
The BBC's Duncan Kennedy in Sydney says that while most explorers dream of discovering uncharted territory, the Australian team appears to have done the opposite - and cartographers everywhere are now rushing to undiscover Sandy Island for ever.

Source 

Another Youtube post on Palestine Conflict

Okay look at the big picture.
Israel shouldn't even exist, they TOOK the land from the Palestinians after WW2 and have OCCUPIED it with a constant expansion ever since. They threw the Palestinians out of their OWN land and isolated them to the west bank and the ghetto known as Gaza where they live in poverty !
You wonder why they are attacking Israel? They're resisting the 60+ year occupation and repression of their country. They get treated like shit.
Justify that..

ItsJUSTaPLANTguys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKv1iRBo9iA

A youtube comment on the Palestine Conflict

Look, boys, the problem is in the phrase "Jewish democracy." Such a construct forbids the equal rights of non-Jews, and it will never work. So forget about "racism." There is no Jewish gene. Judaism is a set of cultural choices and practices like any other religion. If Zionist Jews want to persecute and punish people for not making the same cultural choices, let them punish OTHER self-professed Jews who don't measure up. But get the holy boot of the necks of the Palestinians!
-----37Dionysos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFBWqO_gXjU&feature=g-all-u 

Anonymous message to pro-Israeli groups

Greetings from Anonymous,

It has come to our attention that conservative and pro-Israeli groups throughout the blogosphere have taken advantage of Operation Israel, attempting to solidify public opinion against Anonymous.

TheOtherMcCain.com posted an editorial this morning which stated the following: “If you ever doubted that Anonymous was a terrorist organization, they have now removed all reason for doubt.” The article only contained 55 words of original content by the site itself, the other 90 percent of the article was selected quotations by mainstream media sources.

Let us once again be perfectly clear: Anonymous does not in any way support the use of violence. Anonymous is a world wide collective of individuals whose means pursue human rights, justice, and universal equality for the citizens of every nation.

Pro-Israeli groups throughout the world have grown from a foundation of Israeli/US propaganda and lies.
They arbitrarily dismiss the apartheid system of racial segregation and oppression imposed by the Israeli government on the Palestinian people. The fact of the matter is, in the eyes of the media, only the United States and it’s allies are capable of labeling another state or organization as a terrorists. Throughout our campaign, we’ve been inundated with one response in particular; references to Hamas hiding in school buildings or using women and children as human shields. Selective memory seems to have given pro-Israeli organizations the ability to forget that in 2005 Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz appeared in court to defend the practice of using Palestinians as human shields in combat after a supreme court outlawed the practice, noting it violated International Law.

The reasons for Anonymous intervention through #OpIsrael should be abundantly clear: What is happening in Palestine is oppression. They have no navy, no army, or air force. There is no war in Gaza. There is only the continuous application of military force by Israel in an attempt to push every last person out of the Palestinian state, despite international laws that make these efforts illegal. This illegal expansion of territory by Israel in to the Palestinian state has been ongoing since1948, making refugees of over 700,000 Palestinians. Today, 
Palestinians are not permitted to live in Israeli settlements, drive on Israeli roads or even travel is the “security” areas surrounding them. These Israeli only housing developments are being built on stolen land, even while being called illegal settlements by the International Court of Justice.

The violence inflicted upon the civilian residents of Gaza is well documented, despite the fact that Israel has adamantly opposed intervention by human rights organizations and the IDF constantly blocks and harasses international journalists.

Despite these facts, Anonymous has not used any anti-Semitic language during our campaign. Nor have we vocalized any support for Palestinian military operations or resistance groups. Our goal was to protect the rights of Palestinian people who are threatened with silence as Israel has made attempts to shut down cell phone and internet service throughout Gaza. We know what happens to victims of oppression when the lights go dark.

It is also worthy to note, that as of yesterday, members of Anonymous participating in #OpIsrael were making attempts to augment our Gaza Care Package for civilians in Tel Aviv by translating the same documents in to Hebrew in the event that they lose access to internet service as well. We do not racially or geographically differentiate between victims of violence or oppression anywhere in the world.

Both Palestinians and Israelis need to find common ground and end the violence that has already resulted in the deaths of innocent people, including children. Israel’s advancement on Palestinian Territories and the racist oppression of Palestinian people needs to end.

We are not terrorists. Governments that fund wars, practice deceit against their own citizens, condone corruption, and turn a blind eye to the deaths of innocent people are terrorists. The word terror does not belong to Israel or the United States. We will judge you by your actions.
Peace and Freedom to all,
#OpIsrael
#Anonymous
Anonymous Gaza Care Package
#OpIsrael Information and Tools
Original PR source

Source

Will we ever… have safe cigarettes?

(Copyright: Getty Images)

For decades the tobacco industry has tried to come up with alternatives that people would want to smoke, but this is much harder than you would think. 

There’s an old saying among people who work in public health: Tobacco is the only legal product that, when used as intended, will kill you. Decades of research have thoroughly documented the health problems that result from inhaling tobacco smoke – more than a dozen different types of cancer, heart disease, stroke, emphysema and other respiratory diseases, among others. Are these risks an inevitable part of smoking? Or is there a way of creating safe cigarettes without any of these hazards?
“I think it’s very unlikely,” says Stephen Hecht from the University of Minnesota Cancer Center, who studies tobacco carcinogens – substances that cause cancer. Tobacco smoke is a complex cocktail of at least 4,000 chemicals including at least 70 known carcinogens. No one has made a “cigarette that is significantly decreased in all of these [chemicals] and is still something people would want to smoke, even though the industry has worked on this for around 50 years,” says Hecht. “There’s no indication that it’s possible.”
As Hecht says, it’s not that the industry hasn’t tried. Journalist Will Storr recently documented a history of bungled attempts to create a safer cigarette, from one that passed the carcinogenic smoke through a filter made of another carcinogen – asbestos – to another that heated tobacco rather than burning it, but tasted of sulphur, charcoal, and burning plastic.
The problem is that no single step in the production or consumption process fills cigarette smoke with its dangerous constituents. Some constituents are in the tobacco leaves themselves at the point of harvesting. The plants can absorb metals and metalloids like arsenic and cadmium from fertilisers and the surrounding soil, while sticky hairs on their leaves can gather particles from the air, including radioactive elements like polonium-210.
When the harvested leaves are cured and dried, compounds within them are converted into tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs), a class of well-known and intensely studied carcinogens. And when the smoker lights up, chemical reactions in the burning leaves fill the smoke with carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide and a cocktail of carcinogens – the infamous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and vapour-borne “volatiles” like formaldehyde and benzene. As long as you’re burning plant matter and inhaling the smoke, you’ll get a lungful of carcinogens. “There’s no getting around that fact,” says Neal Benowitz, a pharmacologist from the University of California, San Francisco.
Potent drug
As always with toxicology, it’s the dose that makes the poison, and a laundry list of ingredients is a poor way of assessing a product’s true risk. But it’s clear that many of the substances in cigarette smoke, particularly the well-studied TSNAs, PAHs and volatiles, are found at significant levels in both the smoke and the bodies of smokers who inhale it. And, they cause similar patterns of DNA damage to those seen in actual tumours.
The route of exposure also matters. Many of the chemicals in tobacco smoke are also found in other everyday sources, including foods. But there’s a big difference between taking these substances into your guts, where they pass through a soup of enzymes before being actively transported into the bloodstream, and sucking them directly into your lungs where they can passively diffuse into your blood.
There are some measures that could individually reduce the number of carcinogens in smoke: modifying the blend of tobacco; refining the curing process; including charcoal filters to absorb some of the volatiles; and so on. “But there’s no evidence that this does any good,” says Hecht. None of these measures completely deletes the full spectrum of carcinogens, and Hecht adds, “We tend to focus on the compounds that we know are dangerous, but that’s maybe only a few hundred of the 4,000 that are identified. There could be other things going on that we’re not aware of.”


And then there’s nicotine. This highly addictive drug isn’t a carcinogen, but it’s not entirely benign either. It increases heart rate, constricts blood vessels, and contributes to high levels of cholesterol. There’s some evidence that it could stop cancerous cells from self-destructing or promote the growth of blood vessels that bring oxygen and nutrients to tumours. But both of these claims come from studies in lab-grown cells. “It’s not clear if any of this works in a live animal,” says Hecht. “The big thing [about nicotine] is the addiction.” Nicotine is a potent drug – it’s the one chemical that keeps smokers inhaling all the rest.
Nicotine’s addictive properties have led to some spectacular backfires in attempts to create safer cigarettes. From the 60s and 70s, the tobacco industry marketed “low-tar” cigarettes as safer versions of their normal cousins. These so-called “mild”, “smooth” and “light” alternatives contained tiny vents in their filters, which were meant to allow fresh air to dilute the tar – the collective term for the chemical gunge in smoke.
These cigarettes were tested with machines that, sure enough, measured a lower concentration of tar in the ensuing smoke. But, surprise, people aren’t machines. As the smoke from these brands also contained less nicotine, smokers would get their fix by taking longer drags, smoking more frequently, or simply blocking the filters with their fingers. They ended up inhaling more smoke, and despite the industry’s claims, exposed themselves to the same level of carcinogens.
Safer options?
Smokeless tobacco products fare little better. Even though they are sucked, chewed and sniffed, and never set on fire, they still contain many of the same carcinogens as cigarettes, and have been linked to mouth, oesophageal and pancreatic cancers. The one possible exception is snus, a Swedish product that’s not unlike a “tobacco-stuffed teabag” that you stick under your lips. It’s manufactured according to rigorous standards that limit the amount of nitrosamines in the final product, while still retaining that craving-satisfying nicotine. Snus is billed as the reason for Sweden’s low rates of lung and oral cancers, compared to countries where cigarettes are the dominant tobacco product.
“It’s much safer [than smoked products] but not entirely safe, and there’s a possibility that it still poses a cancer risk,” says Benowitz. Indeed, some recent studies have suggested that snus users have a higher risk of pancreatic cancer, and a higher risk of dying from cancer. “If you simplistically said everyone stopped smoking and used snus, there’d be a tremendous health benefit, but the question is whether they would do that,” says Benowitz. His concerns are that snus could make it harder for active smokers to give up their habit by fuelling nicotine addiction, or act as a gateway drug that entices non-smokers to start. “It’s probably better than smoking, but you probably don’t want to put it in your mouth,” says Hecht.
The same arguments apply to e-cigarettes – battery-powered devices that look like cigarettes, and release a nicotine vapour without any of the accompanying carcinogens. At least, that’s the theory – there’s scant data on what they actually release, and how that varies from brand to brand. An analysis from the US Food and Drug Administration showed that some still contained detectable traces of nitrosamines. “In theory, they could be safer than snus,” says Benowitz. “But there’s been hesitation around them because they are unregulated, so who knows what you’re getting.”
The use of both snus and e-cigarettes will probably remain highly controversial, even after more data comes in. This reflects a tension in public health circles: given smoking is so addictive and damaging, is it acceptable or even ethical to reduce that harm by advocating products that are safer, but still not safe? “If we’d never heard of cigarettes, we’d look at a smokeless tobacco product and say, ‘This thing should be banned’,” says Hecht. In a world where tobacco never existed, these arguments would be moot. But that world does not exist; what do we do in this one?

Source