Tombstone

"This book is really important and valuable. Yang Jisheng was a Xinhua reporter for most of his life. The book was written originally in Chinese, and it’s been translated into English. It’s a compendium of documents and analysis on the Great Famine, which happened between 1958 and 1962. It’s largely based on documents that remained internal and that the Party has not disclosed. I remember giving the Chinese language version of the book to a friend of mine, who is Chinese and very well-informed. He has lived internationally. His grandfather was actually eaten by cannibals. And yet he didn’t know that this famine was a national event. He thought it might have just been a crazy person, a one-off that happened in his own province. That’s the level of knowledge that you have in China about this famine! The Party caused the deaths of millions and millions of people, it’s still undetermined exactly how many. There’s the number that directly died, and many failed to be born as a result, and so on and so forth. But it was easily 30 million people and yet the average Chinese person doesn’t even know about it. I found it a very compelling narrative and interesting exploration. That’s right. My husband was a Hindi expert and served in China’s 1962 border war against India. He wrote what was temporarily a very popular blogpost in China, about that war. It was only up for maybe two days and gathered a million followers (or something like that). I was in the car with him when he got a telephone call from the Propaganda Bureau. They said, ‘We haven’t reached a decision on what we think about this war. So you can’t talk about it.’ The blogpost was taken down. It was about something that happened in 1962! But, 50 years later, they couldn’t decide what they thought about it. It was too small an event for the Party to need to have a view and so they decided nobody could talk about it."

"It’s a very thick book. My first impression of Tombstone was that it really surprised me, in a good way. We all know that in the sixties, during the Mao era, there was a terrifying period of the Great Famine. That was a secret for a long time, which no-one revealed. But with this book, we can now read extensive evidence of it. Of course, Yang Jisheng isn’t a literary writer, he’s a historian. He lives in Beijing and spent many, many years collecting the material for Tombstone . It’s absolutely terrific, and I really admire him. It is a must. Chinese writers must always think of ways to shed light on these secrets. No. Most of them are afraid. There are very few books on the Cultural Revolution, unless they talk about it in a roundabout way. Inside the system, it’s just not possible. The Tiananmen incident is also something you can’t write about, or the anti-Rightist campaign, or land reform. And you can’t write anything directly about the Communist Party. Ideally, you would be able to write about all of these things from within the system, but it’s only really possible to talk about them from the outside. If you do write about them in China, you run a great personal risk. But if you don’t write about them, then you are partly to blame for the system yourself. When I write my novels, my first concern is that I live in England, so I have the freedom to write. If I were in China, I would know what I couldn’t publish or would be persecuted for, and I would be controlled by that. In England, I can write whatever I like. So I write about sensitive topics precisely because I have the freedom to, and therefore the obligation. In China, everything is political. Even air pollution is political. Even if someone in China says there is no politics and everything is free, then that is also politics. England is a developed country, with a democratic and free system in which you can say what you like. While in China, there is no progress and a totalitarian society in which writers can’t criticise the government. In China, the government controls the people. In your country, the people control the government. So China has more need for writers to speak out. This interview was translated from Chinese"