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
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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