'I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book.'
This dramatic paragraph is the start of Mubei (Tombstone), the most authoritative account by a mainland author of the Great Famine of 1959-61, in which more than three times as many people died as in the first world war.
The two-volume, 1,100-page book is a meticulous account of the famine by someone who is particularly well qualified to write it. Yang Jisheng, now 67, joined the Communist Party in 1964, graduated in 1966 from the elite Tsinghua University and joined Xinhua, where he worked for 35 years before his retirement in 2001. He now works as a deputy editor of a Beijing magazine. The book was published in May by Cosmos Books of Hong Kong.
In the early 1990s, Yang began travelling the length and breadth of China to interview witnesses, eventually compiling more than 10 million words of records. His identity as a veteran reporter for the country's top news agency gave him access to people, reports, statistics and historical documents that would have been denied to ordinary people.
Each chapter quotes dozens of notes and sources: Yang's aim was to produce an account that is authoritative and can stand up to the challenge of official denial.
The famine has been a taboo subject on the mainland for the past 47 years and cannot be discussed publicly in books, magazines, newspapers, radio, television or the curricula of schools or universities. The official version is that there were 'three years of disasters', during which many people died of natural causes. The details and the number are left unexplained.
Yang's book is banned on the mainland.