Tombstone

June 18, 2012
One of the 20th century’s worst catastrophes is a monument to Maoist tyranny and mismanagement, argues this hard-hitting study of China’s Great Famine. Chinese journalist Yang, whose father died in the famine, compiles grim statistics—he estimates that 36 million people perished—and heartrending scenes of mass starvation and familial cannibalism. Even more shocking is his account of China’s Great Leap Forward economic campaign, which caused the famine by pulling peasants from fields to work on ill-conceived industrial projects, melting down farming tools in backyard steel mills, and crippling agricultural productivity with collectivization schemes. Yang meticulously analyzes the delusional Communist ideology that nurtured the calamity: terrified of bearing bad news, party officials offered fantastic tales of bumper harvests to their superiors, who then exacerbated the hunger by hiking grain requisition quotas and exporting food while Mao’s sycophantic personality cult prevented moderate leaders from challenging his disastrous economic experiments. This condensed English version of Yang’s two-volume Chinese original suffers from disorganization; the outlines of the famine emerge only fitfully from his fragmented and repetitive accounts of its progress in individual provinces. Still, it’s a harrowing read, illuminating a historic watershed that’s too little known in the West. Map. Agent: Peter Bernstein.