[資訊] China’s Great Shame

[inebriety (酩酊)]

楊繼繩

google了一下作者是中國人，職業是記者、教授。

他po在今天紐約時報上，翻成中國的奇恥大辱好了。



到底大躍進是死幾人阿，怎麼死的人數都差很多？

http://tinyurl.com/bxpcn33

THIRTY-SIX million people in China, including my uncle, who raised me like a 
father, starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity
known as the Great Famine. In thousands of cases, desperately hungry people
resorted to cannibalism.

The toll was more than twice the number of fallen in World War I, and about
six times the number of Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33 or the number
of Jews murdered by Hitler during World War II.

After 50 years, the famine still cannot be freely discussed in the place
where it happened. My book “Tombstone” could be published only in Hong
Kong, Japan and the West. It remains banned in mainland China, where
historical amnesia looms large and government control of information and
expression has tightened during the Communist Party’s 18th National
Congress, which began last week and will conclude with a once-in-a-decade
leadership transition.

Those who deny that the famine happened, as an executive at the state-run
newspaper People’s Daily recently did, enjoy freedom of speech, despite
their fatuous claims about “three years of natural disasters.” But no
plague, flood or earthquake ever wrought such horror during those years. One
might wonder why the Chinese government won’t allow the true tale to be
told, since Mao’s economic policies were abandoned in the late 1970s in
favor of liberalization, and food has been plentiful ever since.

The reason is political: a full exposure of the Great Famine could undermine
the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political legacy of Mao,
even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was the root cause
of the famine. As the economist Amartya Sen has observed, no major famine has
ever occurred in a democracy.

In Mao’s China, the coercive power of the state penetrated every corner of
national life. The rural population was brought under control by a thorough
collectivization of agriculture. The state could then manage grain
production, requisitioning and distributing it by decree. Those who tilled
the earth were locked in place by a nationwide system of household
registration, and food coupons issued to city dwellers supplanted the market.
The peasants survived at the pleasure of the state.

The Great Leap Forward that Mao began in 1958 set ambitious goals without the
means to meet them. A vicious cycle ensued; exaggerated production reports
from below emboldened the higher-ups to set even loftier targets. Newspaper
headlines boasted of rice farms yielding 800,000 pounds per acre. When the
reported abundance could not actually be delivered, the government accused
peasants of hoarding grain. House-to-house searches followed, and any
resistance was put down with violence.

Meanwhile, since the Great Leap Forward mandated rapid industrialization,
even peasants’ cooking implements were melted down in the hope of making
steel in backyard furnaces, and families were forced into large communal
kitchens. They were told that they could eat their fill. But when food ran
short, no aid came from the state. Local party cadres held the rice ladles, a
power they often abused, saving themselves and their families at the expense
of others. Famished peasants had nowhere to turn.

In the first half of 1959, the suffering was so great that the central
government permitted remedial measures, like allowing peasant families to
till small private plots of land for themselves part time. Had these
accommodations persisted, they might have lessened the famine’s impact. But
when Peng Dehuai, then China’s defense minister, wrote Mao a candid letter
to say that things weren’t working, Mao felt that both his ideological
stance and his personal power were being challenged. He purged Peng and
started a campaign to root out “rightist deviation.” Remedial measures like
the private plots were rolled back, and millions of officials were
disciplined for failing to toe the radical line.

The result was starvation on an epic scale. By the end of 1960, China’s
total population was 10 million less than in the previous year.
Astonishingly, many state granaries held ample grain that was mostly reserved
for hard currency-earning exports or donated as foreign aid; these granaries
remained locked to the hungry peasants. “Our masses are so good,” one party
official said at the time. “They would rather die by the roadside than break
into the granary.”

As a journalist and a scholar of contemporary history, I felt a duty to find
out how the Great Famine happened and why. Starting in the 1990s, I visited
more than a dozen provinces, interviewed over a hundred witnesses, and
collected thousands of documents. Since the Great Famine was a forbidden
topic, I could get access to archives only under the pretext of “researching
agricultural policies” or “studying the food issue.”

Communist leaders established a vast system of slavery in the name of
liberating mankind. It was promoted as the “road to paradise,” but in fact
it was a road to perdition.

I intended my book to be a memorial to the 36 million victims, but also a
literal tombstone, anticipating the ultimate demise of the totalitarian
political system that caused the Great Famine. I was mindful of the risks in
this endeavor: if something happens to me because I tried to preserve a
truthful memory, then let the book stand as my tombstone, too.

Yang Jisheng, deputy editor of the historical journal Yanhuang Chunqiu and a
former editor at the Xinhua News Agency, is the author of “Tombstone: The
Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962.” This essay was translated by Guo Jian from
the Chinese.

--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc)
◆ From: 118.233.182.50
推 vesting:反中集團這樣做其實是在幫忙訓練愛國份子
看過馮內果的《貓的搖籃》嗎？

達賴跟中共其實一直在演戲而已，所有達賴演講的錢都會回到中共那裡去。

※ 編輯: inebriety       來自: 118.233.182.50       (11/15 00:15)
推 Aadmiral:不太懂1樓的意思。是說看到這些,就想更
→ Aadmiral:支持共產黨?