After I finished reading Yang Jisheng’s book,
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, an extensive analysis on the worst man-made calamity in human history, I couldn’t help but wonder: If Yang’s book were required reading for American college students, would so many young people embrace socialism so enthusiastically?
Yang opens the book with his father’s death in 1959. It was April, and Yang was a high school student. Since his school was far from the village where his father lived, Yang rarely saw his father during the school year. One day, a villager brought Yang the dreadful message his father was dying of starvation. Yang rushed home. He found utter destitution.
As Americans Turn Left, We Should Remember Socialism Killed 36 Million Chinese
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In ‘Weighing In: Why Waistlines are Widening in China’s Biggest Cities,’ our February 2021 cover story, we address how China’s economic prosperity has beefed up its people and what can be done to slim it down.
Wealth and waistlines have a tendency to grow together. China’s rapidly developing economy has helped raise the standard of living to meteoric heights in recent decades. And while people in the Middle Kingdom are now wealthier, their diets have become ‘richer’ but not better. The country’s leading health authority drew attention to the elephant on the scale in a report released last December, revealing that more than half (50.7%) of Chinese adults were now overweight – a 27% increase since 2002.
Amotekun, Chinese sparrows and the rise of ethnic militia
By
Thu Jan 14 2021
In 1958, the Chinese government of Mao Zedong designed a campaign to rid the country of four undesirables mosquitoes, flies, rats and sparrows. China’s quest for rapid industrialisation, or the ‘Great Leap Forward’ must not be hindered by these ‘pests,’ believed to be affecting crop production. The sparrows were targeted because they ate grains and fruits and shortened food supplies. Millions of Chinese took up the campaign with gusto. They went out with their drums and pans and everything else they could use to generate noise and made so much racket to frighten the sparrows and keep the birds from settling down to rest. Traumatised, the birds flew around and around until exhausted, they would fall out of the sky, dead. In this way, millions of sparrows were killed, at least three million in Beijing alone.