Yang Jisheng's Tombstone is the book that broke the silence on of one of history's most terrible crimes
More people died in Mao's Great Famine than in the entire First World War, yet this story has remained largely untold, until now. Still banned in China, Tombstone draws on the author's privileged access to official and unofficial sources to uncover the full human cost of the tragedy, and create an unprecedented work of historical reckoning.
'A book of great importance' Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans
'The first proper history of China's great famine ... So thorough is his documentation that some are already calling Yang "China's Solzhenitsyn"' Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History

Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine

History

Jisheng, Yang

Asia

Penguin

The much-anticipated definitive account of Chinas Great Famine An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women and children starved to death during Chinas Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as the three years of natural disaster. As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang lays the deaths at the feet of Chinas totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest. Tombstone is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective mem

Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Yang Jisheng'sThe World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail. As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People's Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong's ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union's "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This ten-year-longclass struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation's economy. Following his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine,Tombstone, Yang Jisheng here presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding those years' lasting influence today. The World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and Mao-style cult of personality.

The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great Famine 
An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural disaster." As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest. Tombstone is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, Tombstone is written both as a memorial to the lives lost―an enduring tombstone in memory of the dead―and in hopeful anticipation of the final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in The New York Review of Books, called the Chinese edition of Tombstone "groundbreaking . . . One of the most important books to come out of China in recent years."

About the Author\nYang Jisheng was born in 1940, joined the Communist Party in 1964, and worked for the Xinhua News Agency from January 1968 until his retirement in 2001. He is now a deputy editor at Yanhuang Chunqiu (Chronicles of History), an official journal that regularly skirts censorship with articles on controversial political topics. He is the author of the book Tombstone.\nStacy Mosher learned Chinese in Hong Kong, where she lived for nearly 18 years. She is the co-translator of Yang Jisheng's Tombstone. A long-time journalist, Mosher currently works as an editor and translator in Brooklyn.\nGuo Jian is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Originally trained in Chinese language and literature, Guo was on the Chinese faculty of Beijing Normal University until he came to the United States to study for his PhD in English in the mid-1980’s. He was a translator of Yang Jisheng's Tombstone.\nYang Jisheng’s The World Turned Upside Down is the definitive history of the Cultural Revolution, in withering and heartbreaking detail.\nAs a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong’s ultra-leftist politics. Following Tombstone, his groundbreaking and award-winning history of the Great Famine, Yang Jisheng presents the only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, and makes a crucial contribution to understanding the lasting influence of those years.\nThe World Turned Upside Down puts every political incident, major and minor, of those ten years under extraordinary and withering scrutiny, and arrives in English at a moment when contemporary Chinese governance is leaning once more toward a highly centralized power structure and a Mao-style cult of personality.

World Turned Upside Down

Picador Paper

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Books by Jisheng, Yang

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jisheng, Yang. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine

Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

World Turned Upside Down