China's Great Shame

Every country has its shame. Ours is slavery. For Germany it's the Hitler years. For China, it is the 36 million people that starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity known as the Great Famine. I recently read a New York Times story on the subject and recalled a fiction book I read on the subject last year, Dreams of Joy, by Lisa See. I still remember vividly Lisa's descriptions of life in China during that period, and even though her book was fiction, from what I've read about the great famine, it was very real. The 36 million lost to starvation twice outweighs the number of fallen men in World War 1, and about six times the number of Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33, or the number of Jews murdered by Hitler during World War 11. 50 years later, the famine is still a taboo subject in China. Books on the topic, like Yang Jisheng's Tombstone, could only be published in Hong Kong, Japan, and the West. China has historical amnesia, and is tightening government control on information and expression in it's most recent Communist Party National Congress. Even as they have become major players on the world stage in many ways, China will not tell its people the truth. The party line rhetoric says that there were three years of natural disasters, but no plague, flood or earthquake ever wrought such horror during those years. The reason that China does not want to tell people the truth is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political legacy of Mao, even though that legacy is the root cause of the famine. In Mao's China the state penetrated every corner of national life. Rural populations were brought under control through collectivization of agriculture. The peasants survived at the pleasure of the state. The Great Leap Forward was Mao's ambitious attempt at rapid industrialization, without the means to achieve. The people were lied to, as newspapers boasted of huge production from rice farms which were not true. Peasants were forced to give anything metal to the state, which melted it down and used it in building. Families were forced into communal kitches. Food ran short, and no aid ever came. The result was starvation on an epic scale. I have not yet read Tombstone, Jisheng's account of how the Great Famine happened and why, but I will. Dreams of Joy, by Lisa See, is fiction, but she has done her homework, and gives you the feeling of what life might have been like during that period. I highly recommend it to anyone who finds this topic of interest.