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Jewish World Review August 13, 2008 / 12 Menachem-Av 5768 When China Starved By Anne Applebaum http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Cymbals clashed; a giant scroll unfurled. There were fireworks, kites, "ancient soldiers" marching in formation, modern dancers bending their bodies into impossible shapes, astronauts, puppets, children, multiple high-tech gizmos. The Olympic opening ceremonies showed you China as China wants you to see it. But for a deeper understanding of how far China has come — and of how odd its transformation continues to be — switch off the Olympics. Instead, spend a few minutes contemplating the existence of a new book: the first proper history of China's Great Famine, a catastrophe partly engineered by the Chinese Communist Party and its first leader, Mao Zedong. "I call this book Tombstone," the author, Yang Jisheng, writes in the opening paragraph. "It is a tombstone for my 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." "Tombstone" has not been translated. Nevertheless, rumors of its contents and short excerpts are already ricocheting around the world (I first learned of it recently in California, from an excited Australian historian). Based on a decade's worth of interviews and unprecedented access to documents and statistics, "Tombstone" — in two volumes and 1,100 pages — establishes beyond any doubt that China's misguided charge toward industrialization — Mao's "Great Leap Forward" — was an utter disaster. A combination of criminally bad policies (farmers were forced to make steel instead of growing crops; peasants were forced into unproductive communes) and official cruelty (China was grimly exporting grain at the time) created, between 1959 and 1961, one of the worst famines in recorded history. "I went to one village and saw 100 corpses," one witness told Yang. "Then another village and another 100 corpses. No one paid attention to them. People said that dogs were eating the bodies. Not true, I said. The dogs had long ago been eaten by the people." So thorough is his documentation, apparently, that some are already calling Yang "China's Solzhenitsyn," in honor of the Russian dissident — who died last week — who probably did the most to expose the crimes of Stalin. But the comparison is not quite right. Yang is not a dissident but a longtime Communist Party member. For more than three decades, he was a reporter for Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. As a result, he had access to party documents that no one else has ever had. More to the point, he is not an outsider: On the contrary, he, his book and the story of the famine itself have a status in China that is hard to define. Though the book is banned on the mainland, it was published in Hong Kong, where it sold out immediately. At the same time, while the famine officially didn't occur — Chinese history textbooks speak of "three years of natural disasters," not of a mass artificial famine, caused by Chairman Mao — many people clearly remember it well, understand Mao's role in what happened and are willing to discuss it in private. Like the communist legacy, the famine exists in a kind of limbo: undiscussed in public, unacknowledged by the state, yet a vivid part of popular memory. Because China is no longer a totalitarian country, merely an authoritarian one, a journalist like Yang could spend 10 years working on the history of the famine, openly soliciting interviews and documents. But because the Chinese Communist Party neither openly embraces nor rejects the legacy of Mao — his name was not mentioned during the Olympics' opening ceremonies, though his picture still hangs over the entrance to the Forbidden City — there is no public discussion or debate. It's not hard to understand why this is so. If the Chinese Communist Party were to present an honest version of its past, its own legitimacy might come into question. Why, exactly, does a party with a history drenched in blood and suffering enjoy a monopoly on political power in China? Why does a nominally Marxist party, one whose economic theories proved utterly bankrupt in the past, still preside over an explosively capitalist society? Because there aren't any good answers to those questions, it is in the Chinese leadership's interest to make sure they don't get asked. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. APPLEBAUM'S LATEST Gulag: A History   Nearly 30 million prisoners passed through the Soviet Union's labor camps in their more than 60 years of operation. This remarkable volume, the first fully documented history of the gulag, describes how, largely under Stalin's watch, a regulated, centralized system of prison labor-unprecedented in scope-gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. Fueled by waves of capricious arrests, this prison labor came to underpin the Soviet economy. JWR's Applebaum, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, draws on newly accessible Soviet archives as well as scores of camp memoirs and interviews with survivors to trace the gulag's origins and expansion Sales help fund JWR. Comment on JWR contributor Anne Applebaum's column by clicking here. Previously: 08/11/08: Two of the world's rising powers are strutting their stuff 08/05/08: How Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago changed the world 07/29/08:‘The Hour of Europe’ Tolls Again … But are European politicians up to the task? 07/15/08: Why Does Obama Want To Campaign in Berlin? 07/01/08: Citizen Athletes: How did a guy who can't speak Polish end up scoring Poland's only goal of Euro 2008? 06/24/08: Why do we expect presidential candidates to be kind? 06/17/08: Pity the Poor Eurocrats 06/12/08: Is the World Ready for a Black American President? 05/28/08: The Busiest Generation: America seems to value its children's status and achievements over their happiness 05/20/08: Leave Hitler Out of It: The craze for injecting the Nazis into political debate must end 05/13/08: A Drastic Remedy: The case for intervention in Burma 05/07/08: A Warning Shot From Moscow? 04/23/08: Radio to stay tuned to 04/17/08: China learns the price of a few weeks of global attention 04/01/08: Head scarves are potent political symbols 03/26/08: The Olympics are the perfect place for a protest 03/19/08: Could Tibet bring down modern China? 03/12/08: Have political autobiographies made us more susceptible to fake memoirs? 03/05/08: Why does Russia bother to hold elections? 02/20/08: Kosovo is a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences 02/06/08: A Craven Canterbury Tale 02/06/08: French prez' whirlwind romance reminds voters of his political recklessness © 2008, Anne Applebaum

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