Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone uses the Communist Party’s own records to piece together the full horror of a government-induced famine that killed 36 million people
Does for China’s past what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did for Russia’s
The New York Review of Books calls Tombstone “legendary…a landmark”
Perhaps the most important book ever written about China under Mao Zedong, Yang Jisheng’s masterful work Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 exposes the monstrosity of government policies that directly caused the horrific deaths of tens of millions of citizens.
A Chinese journalist now in his seventies, Yang spent 20 years poring through Communist Party archives to piece together the events leading to the mass nationwide starvation during China’s Great Leap Forward. It is estimated that 36 million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during the Great Famine, Yang’s own father among them. Yang used his unique position within the Communist Party as a journalist to accumulate thousands of restricted official documents on the famine, which Chinese officials originally called natural disaster.
Originally a supporter of the Great Leap Forward, Yang worked 35 years as a journalist for state-run media in China. He quietly researched Tombstone for more than two decades, concluding that the millions of deaths resulting from famine were the direct result of state policies tied to the Great Leap Forward, not natural disaster. Tombstone is widely considered the definitive account of the Great Famine and the most comprehensive statement yet produced about this catastrophe.
Stumbling onto Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom helped Yang come up with a way to explain how the tragedy of the Great Famine could occur. According to Hayek Prize Selection Committee Chair Amity Shlaes and Manhattan Institute President Larry Mone, “Fortified with such knowledge Yang, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Soviet Russia before him, shared his information with the world.”
Yang arrived in New York this week to accept the 2013 Hayek Prize and talk about his important work. At the Hayek Prize dinner, he will be introduced by John Taylor, last year’s winner for First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity. Following Yang’s address, he will be interviewed by Russell Roberts, a Hoover Institution fellow and host of the popular weekly EconTalk podcast. Roberts also serves on the Hayek Prize selection committee.
The Hayek Prize is one of the most prestigious book prizes in the United States. Conceived and funded by Manhattan Institute trustee Tom Smith, the prize honors the book published within the past two years that best reflects F.A. Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty. F.A. Hayek, the author of groundbreaking works such as The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, was a formative influence on the Manhattan Institute.
Past winners include:
- John B. Taylor, First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity
- Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
- Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds, Money, Markets and Sovereignty
- Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
- William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
- John Tomasi, Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens Society and the Boundaries of Political Theory
- Lord Robert Skidelsky, The Road from Serfdom: The Economic and Political Consequences of the End of Communism
- Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism