Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Nancy Wu
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22 hr 52 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great Famine



An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural disaster."



As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.



Tombstone is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed by those in power.
The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great Famine An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly und...

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About the author

Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar was born in Lahore, India on December 2, 1930. He graduated with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Keble College, Oxford University, in 1953. He briefly worked at The Telegraph of London before receiving a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University. In 1960, he founded The China Quarterly, an academic journal on Chinese politics and economics published by the University of Cambridge. He was elected to Parliament in Britain as a Labour candidate in 1974 and served for five years. He went on to teach history and political science at Harvard. He was the director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard from 1986 to 1992, and again from 2005 to 2006. He wrote several books including The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. He died from heart failure on February 10, 2019 at the age of 88.
Roderick Lemonde MacFarquhar was born in Lahore, India on December 2, 1930. He graduated with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Keble College, Oxford University, in 1953. He briefly worked at The Telegraph of London before receiving a master's degree in East Asian studies from H...

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