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“A tombstone is memory made concrete. Human memory is the ladder on which a country and a people advance. We must remember not only the good things, but also the bad; the bright spots, but also the darkness. The authorities in a totalitarian system strive to conceal their faults and extol their merits, gloss over their errors and forcibly eradicate all memory of man-made calamity, darkness, and evil.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

“Cadres who spoke the truth were labeled “deniers of achievementâ€� and “right deviationists,â€� and were subjected to merciless struggle.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“The report recommended meeting the procurement quota through a socialist education campaign and mass debates. While the report was being written, people starved to death.19”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“An accountant for one production team recalled, “The production team cadres gathered at Zhangli for a meeting. Everyone had to report grain, and those who failed had to go through group training, criticism, struggle, and beating.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“During procurement, the leader of the Sanpisi production brigade told his commune party secretary, “People actually have no food to eat down there.â€� The commune secretary criticized him: “That’s right-deviationist thinking—you’re viewing the problem in an overly simplistic manner!â€� That brigade held four meetings to counter hoarding and to search out hidden caches, and local leaders became struggle targets. The brigade was compelled to report 120,000 kilos of concealed grain, but not a single kernel was discovered.17”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“President Liu Shaoqi at one point frankly acknowledged this: At present there is a conflict between the amount of grain the government needs and the amount that the peasants are willing to sell, and this conflict is quite severe. The peasantsâ€� preference is to sell the government whatever is left over after they’ve eaten their fill. If the government only took its procurement after the peasants had eaten their fill, the rest of us would not have enough to eat: the workers, teachers, scientists, and others living in the cities. If these people don’t get enough to eat, industrialization cannot be carried out and the armed forces will also have to be reduced, making our national defense construction impossible to implement.29”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“The realization that I had been deceived for so long engendered a will to shake off this deception. The more the authorities concealed the truth, the more I felt compelled to pursue it, and I began reading volumes of newly published material. The turmoil in Beijing in 1989 led me to a profound awakening; the blood of those young students cleansed my brain of all the lies I had accepted over the previous decades. As a journalist, I strove to report the truth. As a scholar, I felt a responsibility to restore historical truth for others who had been deceived.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“While at university, I served as the Youth League’s branch secretary and joined the Communist Party in May 1964. At that time young people like me were considered very naïve and simple, and it was true: our minds contained only the beliefs imbued by the public opinion apparatus, and nothing else. In this way the party molded the generation growing up under the new regime into its loyal disciples. If no major events had occurred during these decades, our generation would have retained those beliefs for our entire lives.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“Friends and relatives encouraged me to erect a gravestone for my father. I thought that even though I was not a high official, I would erect for my father a tombstone grander than any of those others. Then I recalled that in 1958, many of the village's tombstones had been dismantled for use in irrigation projects or as bases for smelting ovens in the steelmaking campaign during the Great Leap Forward; some had been laid out on roadways. The more impressive the monument, the greater the likelihood of it being demolished. My father's tombstone had to be erected not on the ground, but in my heart. A tombstone in the heart could never be demolished or trampled underfoot.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

“Confronted by the severe consequences of the Great Famine, President Liu Shaoqi once said to Mao Zedong, “History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!â€�26 In the spring of 1962, Liu once again noted that “Deaths by starvation will be recorded in the history books.â€�27 Yet after more than forty years, no full account of the Great Famine has been published in mainland China. More than regrettable from a historical standpoint, it is an offense to the memories of the tens of millions of innocent victims.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“Ancient annals report cases of families exchanging children to consume during severe famines, but during the Great Famine, some families resorted to eating their own children. I met people who had eaten human flesh, and heard them describe its taste. Reliable evidence indicates there were thousands of cases of cannibalism throughout China at that time.23 Some are described in the chapters that follow. It is a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“Starvation was a prolonged agony. The grain was gone, the wild herbs had all been eaten, even the bark had been stripped from the trees, and bird droppings, rats, and cotton batting were used to fill stomachs. In the kaolin clay fields,22 starving people chewed on the clay as they dug it. The corpses of the dead, famine victims seeking refuge from other villages, even one’s own family members, became food for the desperate.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“In a country in which an imperial mentality was deeply entrenched, people from the outset regarded the central government as the voice of authority, and the party used the “magical powerâ€� of the central government to instill its values in the entire populace. Inexperienced youth sincerely believed in these teachings, and their parents, out of either blind faith or fear of the regime, did their best to prevent their children from revealing any line of thought diverging from that of the government, requiring their children to be submissive and obedient.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“After the CCP gained power, it sealed China off from information beyond its borders, and imposed a wholesale negation of China’s traditional moral standards. The government’s monopoly on information gave it a monopoly on truth. As the center of power, the party Center was also the heart of truth and information. All social science research organs endorsed the validity of the Communist regime; every cultural and arts group lavished praise on the CCP, while news organs daily verified its wisdom and might. From nursery school to university, the chief mission was to inculcate a Communist worldview in the minds of all students. The social science research institutes, cultural groups, news organs, and schools all became tools for the party’s monopoly on thought, spirit, and opinion, and were continuously engaged in molding China’s youth. People employed in this work were proud to be considered “engineers of the human soul.â€� In this thought and information vacuum, the central government used its monopoly apparatus to instill Communist values while criticizing and eradicating all other values. In this way, young people developed distinct and intense feelings of right and wrong, love and hate, which took the shape of a violent longing to realize Communist ideals. Any words or deeds that diverged from these ideals would be met with a concerted attack. The party organization was even more effective at instilling values than the social science research institutes, news and cultural organs, and schools. Each level of the party had a core surrounded by a group of stalwarts, with each layer controlling the one below it and loyal to the one above. Successive political movements, hundreds and thousands of large and small group meetings, commendation ceremonies and struggle sessions, rewards and penalties, all served to draw young people onto a single trajectory. All views diverging from those of the party were nipped in the bud.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“After the CCP gained power, it sealed China off from information beyond its borders, and imposed a wholesale negation of China’s traditional moral standards. The government’s monopoly on information gave it a monopoly on truth. As the center of power, the party Center was also the heart of truth and information. All social science research organs endorsed the validity of the Communist regime; every cultural and arts group lavished praise on the CCP, while news organs daily verified its wisdom and might. From nursery school to university, the chief mission was to inculcate a Communist worldview in the minds of all students. The social science research institutes, cultural groups, news organs, and schools all became tools for the party’s monopoly on thought, spirit, and opinion, and were continuously engaged in molding China’s youth. People employed in this work were proud to be considered “engineers of the human soul.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“I harbored no doubts regarding the party’s propaganda about the accomplishments of the “Great Leap Forwardâ€� or the advantages of the people’s communes. I believed that what was happening in my home village was isolated, and that my father’s death was merely one family’s tragedy. Compared with the advent of the great Communist society, what was my family’s petty misfortune? The party had taught me to sacrifice the self for the greater good when encountering difficulty, and I was completely obedient. I maintained this frame of mind right up until the Cultural Revolution.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“the CCP’s dictatorship of the proletariat made Mao the most powerful emperor who had ever ruled China.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“At Hongguang Commune, a roadside area of more than 2,000 mu was cleared of more than 180 dwellings. At least 12,000 homes were dismantled throughout the county. Unrelated families were obliged to share quarters, sometimes with domestic fowl. Cadres burst into homes without notice, tossed out belongings, and reduced a house to rubble in an instant. Commune members returning from deployment elsewhere wept upon finding their homes, wives, and children gone. Some families relocated seven times in a year. Cadres ransacked homes, often snatching desirable goods. Some commune members retaliated by hiding snakes in their rice jars.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

“The campaign against right deviation revived the Communist Wind, Exaggeration Wind, Coercive Commandism Wind, and Chaotic Directives Wind that had been restrained during the first half of 1959.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“As opposed to parliamentary politics, China at that time had “conference politics.â€� The Chinese language artfully reverses the characters for parliament (yihui) to make the phrase for conference (huiyi)—in the process, transforming a democratic institution into an autocratic tool for implementing the intentions of the supreme leader and besieging those with dissenting views. In imperial politics, the ruler states his views, but if he attempts to wrongfully punish someone, another can speak in that person’s defense. “Conference politicsâ€� imposes a more devastating “dictatorship of the majorityâ€� in which all chime in to support the supreme leader, and it is impossible for an individual to intercede on behalf of the oppressed.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“Later the county authorities ordered a “sanitation driveâ€� in which all burial pits were stomped flat so that no trace could be found. Jing”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962

“China has undergone an enormous transformation. But because the political system remains unchanged, the great changes in the economic and social sphere have resulted in an unequal allocation of the fruits and costs of economic reform. The combined abuses under the exclusive profit orientation of a market economy and the untrammeled power of totalitarianism have created an endless supply of injustice, exacerbating discontent among the lower-class majority.”
― Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958â€�1962