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(c) Yang Jisheng
Yang 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.
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On September 24, 1970, the Rolling Stones interrupted their concert at the Palais des Sports in Paris to invite a French Maoist called Serge July onstage. News of an earthshaking event called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had been trickling out of China since 1966. Information was scarce, but many writers and activists in the West who were opposed to the United States and its war in Vietnam were becoming fascinated with Mao Zedong, their earlier infatuation with Soviet-style Marxism having soured. Jean-Paul Sartre hawked copies of a banned Maoist newspaper in Paris, and Michel Foucault was among those who turned to China for political inspiration, in what Sartre called “new forms of class struggle in a period of organized capitalism.”
John SextonPosted at 5:45 pm on December 18, 2020
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Yang Jisheng is a Chinese historian who lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as a young man. He started out as a member of the Communist Party and eventually became a reporter for a state news service. But his viewpoint changed in 1989 after he saw the Party’s crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square. He used his access to primary sources as a Communist Party member and began putting together a book on the famines associated with the Great Leap Forward.
That book, titled Tombstone, was an unsparing account of what led to the deaths of more than 30 million people, was published in 2008 and translated into English four years later.
There is so much to learn about China and these books are a good start
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DecDecember 2020 at 5:23am
We still know so little about China, a country that has been the centre of global power for centuries and is reshaping the 21st century.
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The American Civil War comes immediately to mind but it isn t even close.
As many as 750,000 Americans died between 1861 and 1865 in the conflict between northern and southern states.
But a decade earlier, a civil war in China left between 20 and 30 million people dead.
The Taiping Rebellion ranks among the worst conflicts in human history.