Yang Jisheng is a Chinese

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

 journalist and author of Tombstone (Mùbēi), a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward

Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China , reflected in planning decisions from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern...

. Yang joined the Communist Party

Communist Party of China

The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...

 in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University

Tsinghua University

Tsinghua University , colloquially known in Chinese as Qinghua, is a university in Beijing, China. The school is one of the nine universities of the C9 League. It was established in 1911 under the name "Tsinghua Xuetang" or "Tsinghua College" and was renamed the "Tsinghua School" one year later...

 in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency

Xinhua News Agency

The Xinhua News Agency is the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China and the biggest center for collecting information and press conferences in the PRC. It is the largest news agency in the PRC, ahead of the China News Service...

, where he worked until his retirement in 2001. As of 2008, he was the deputy editor of the journal Yanhuang Chunqiu (炎黄春秋) (Chronicles of History) in Beijing

Beijing

Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...

. Yang Jisheng is also listed as a Fellow of China Media Project, a department under Hong Kong University.

Work on the Great Famine

Beginning in the early 1990s, Yang began interviewing people and collecting records of The Great Famine of 1959-1961, in which his own foster father had died, eventually accumulating ten million words of records. He published a two-volume 1,208 page account of the period, in which he meticulously cited his sources to prevent the Chinese government from dismissing it. It was widely acclaimed as being the definitive account of the Great Famine. He begins the book,

I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my [foster] father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book.

The book, not yet translated from Chinese, was published in Hong Kong and is banned in mainland China.

Published works

• 墓碑 －－中國六十年代大饑荒紀實 (Mubei - - Zhongguo Liushi Niandai Da Jihuang Jishi) ("Tombstone: An Account of Chinese Famine in the 1960s"), Hong Kong: Cosmos Books (Tiandi Tushu), 2008, ISBN 9789882119093 . By 2010, it was appearing under the title: 墓碑: 一九五八-一九六二年中國大饑荒紀實 (Mubei: Yi Jiu Wu Ba - Yi Jiu Liu Er Nian Zhongguo Da Jihuang Shiji) ("Tombstone: An Account of Chinese Famine From 1958-1962").

See also

• Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
• Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
  Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
  Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, is a book written by Jasper Becker, Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post. It was published by Holt Paperbacks in 1998.-External links:**** The Future of Freedom Foundation...
  
  

External Links

• Richard McGregor
  Richard McGregor
  Richard McGregor is a journalist, writer and author. He was the chief political correspondent, Japan correspondent and China correspondent for The Australian. He also worked for the International Herald Tribune, the BBC and the Far Eastern Economic Review. He has worked as a journalist in Taiwan,...
  
  . The man who exposed Mao’s secret famine. The Financial Times. June 12, 2010.
• Ian Johnson. Finding the Facts About Mao’s Victims. The New York Review of Books
  The New York Review of Books
  The New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...
  
  (Blog), December 20, 2010