Yang Jisheng writes in what is the first chapter of the English version of his two-volume Chinese-language book on the Great Famine (Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai da jihuang jishi, Hong Kong, Cosmos Books: 2008): “I did erect a tombstone for my father, in my heart, and this book is made up of the words I carved into that tombstone. Even after I leave this life, these heartfelt words will remain behind in libraries throughout the world” (p. 12). By this sentence he explains why he went through nearly 20 years of intensive, yet never officially sanctioned, research to write a 1,600-page manuscript in Chinese on the 35 million people who died during the Great Famine of 1958–1962 and the 40 million who were not born because of this disaster. Back in 1959, Yang Jisheng was a 19-year-old student when he was informed by one of his friends from the village that his father was starving to death. Yang did not get back to the village early enough to save his father's life. Many years later, he realized that what he had encountered was not just the fate of an individual or a problem of malnutrition in his native village. After accumulating doubts about the legitimacy of CCP rule in China for many years, in 1989 he finally decided to strive to understand the whole picture of the Great Famine, including its temporal and spatial dimensions as well as its political and cultural roots.

The English version of the book is a reader's digest of more than 600 pages, rearranged to meet the interest of a non-Chinese readership and to attract the attention of an interested public which is not as deeply enmeshed in the issue as the Chinese audience would be. The book reveals in detail both the situation in several provinces down to the grass-root level as well as the situation at the top of the political system. It quotes from a wide variety of sources including archival materials found in county archives, special reports written by investigative groups sent to the villages while the Great Famine was going on as well as ex post reports by government officials. It also refers to newspaper reports and to interviews conducted since the 1990s with the journalists who had written the reports at the time. Finally, it quotes from memoirs often unpublished or unofficially published in the PRC and beyond, in which intellectuals describe the memories of the Great Famine. Last but not least, Yang Jisheng shows great knowledge of the many efforts scholars from outside the PRC have made to shed light on the Great Famine, but remarks that they have only limited access to the sources and therefore cannot come to an overall assessment of the situation. When I first started doing research on the memory of the Great Famine in the 1990s, I questioned how Chinese society could have kept silent on this horrible disaster for so many years. For Yang Jisheng, the more urgent question he tries to answer is why so many people actively participated in inducing this disaster and why only so few made efforts to bring it to an immediate end.

He answers this question by referring to the totalitarian character of the political system. This system made it impossible even for those who were ready to fight the disaster at the top of the hierarchy – like Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai – to take actions early enough to save people's lives; and it forced cadres at all levels of the bureaucracy to comply with the policies at the top in order to avoid being victimized by the system. The peasants were unable to use their traditional repertoire of survival techniques as they were made totally dependent on the state by way of collectivization. All of these actors were part and parcel of the same Maoist system, with Mao finding explanations for everything: he declared that the disaster was due to the sabotage carried out by rich peasants creeping into the Communist Party and damaging it from within. Therefore, the disaster could only be overcome by way of yet another round of political struggle against rightist elements. Whoever tried to argue against him would be labelled a rightist.

What makes the book extremely interesting, especially for specialists in the field, is the fact that Yang Jisheng despite his fundamental critique of totalitarianism draws a vivid picture of people at all levels of the system counteracting mainstream policies, struggling for survival beyond what was conceived as compliance at the time, daring their lives to help their compatriots by opening storehouses or by articulating their doubts in political debates. In contrast to what is written in the introduction to the book and to what is sometimes articulated by Yang Jisheng in the text, we learn from this magnum opus how state, party and society struggled for survival despite the fact that the system did not allow for this kind of struggle. Many of the stories Yang tells in his book and many of the explanations he gives can be found in books which were published earlier than his. But all these books lack the richness of sources and the starting point from which Mubei is written: the collective shame of a society which has accepted a ruler responsible for the Great Famine disaster.