Yang Jisheng (journalist)
Yang Jisheng (born November 1940)[1][2] is a Chinese journalist and author. His work include Tombstone (墓碑), a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward, and The World Turned Upside Down (天地翻覆), a history of the Cultural Revolution. Yang joined the Communist Party in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until his retirement in 2001. His loyalty to the party was destroyed by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.[3]
In this Chinese name, the family name is Yang.Yang Jisheng
楊繼繩
杨继绳
Yáng Jìshéng
Yáng Jìshéng
Although he continued working for the Xinhua News Agency, he spent much of his time researching for Tombstone. As of 2008, he was the deputy editor of the journal Yanhuang Chunqiu in Beijing.[1][4] Yang is also listed as a Fellow of China Media Project, a department under Hong Kong University.[4]
Work[edit]
Tombstone: The Great Famine[edit]
Beginning in the early 1990s, Yang began interviewing people and collecting records of the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961, in which his own foster father had died, eventually accumulating ten million words of records. He published a two-volume 1,208-page account of the period, in which he aimed to produce an account that is authoritative and can stand up to the challenge of official denial by the Chinese government. He begins the book, "I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my [foster] 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."[1] The book was published in Hong Kong and is banned in mainland China.[5][6] In 2012 translations into French, German, and English[7] (which has been condensed almost by 50%)[8] have been published.[9][10] He was reported to be banned from leaving China to receive the award in a ceremony in Harvard University to be held in March 2016.[11]