Yang Jisheng’s book, Tombstone, is an expose of the worst period of Mao Zedong’s totalitarian regime, when the Great leap Forward was at its peak and humanity at its nadir. A totalitarian system still exists in China
The transition of leadership in People’s Republic of China, the crackdown on corruption in high places and the move to downsize Government there have led to gushing editorials and commentaries in the media here. Experts have been advising India to take tips from Beijing on how to govern and tackle contentious issues effectively. There may be some lessons in much of what is happening in China, but nothing changes the basic fact that a totalitarian regime is a danger to the society it governs and that the ‘good’ it does is in fact more of propaganda than reality. Therefore, instead of being mesmerised by the recent developments in our Communist neighbourhood, we must recall the tragedies that such a totalitarian system has wreaked on the helpless people of that country — and has the power to do so again.
There is no better instance to illustrate the monstrosity of the rulers that have supposedly represented the peasants and the working class than the great famine of 1958-62 which claimed a shockingly unbelievable 36 million lives of poor, underprivileged Chinese. citizens. What is even more shocking is that the famine was man-made, or rather Mao-made.
Why is it that there is virtually no discussion in India on this human tragedy even as the achievements of China occupy prime space in the print and the electronic mediaIJ That is clearly because discussions in our media are still largely dominated by the left-leaning intellectuals, and they are forever trying to deflect attention from the colossal failures of the totalitarian regime which has governed our northern neighbour for decades. That rule has essentially remained the same; only the rulers have changed. The few people who have the courage to come out in the open and slam Beijing for its atrocities are dubbed either Rightists or communal — or at best lacking in understanding of the issue. For the left-leaning intellectuals, the loss of 36 million lives during Mao Zedong’s regime, and in just four years, is an inconvenient fact of the past that must not be allowed to cast a shadow on China’s dazzling present and glorious future.
Unfortunately for these apologists, that is not going to happen, because the curse of one generation passes on to the other. And, if the media wants a ‘context’ in which to discuss one of humankind’s greatest tragedies ever and the role of Communist rulers of China, it is there in the recently published book, Tombstone, by China’s well-known journalist Yang Jisheng. Originally written in Chinese in two volumes, the English version is an abridged form (though it still runs into more than 600 pages) and is perhaps the only most detailed account of those terrible four years when Mao’s brigade ravaged the lives of poor peasants.
The book has shocking graphic details of the tragedy, and it illustrates how the Communist country’s supreme leader led his people to starvation, to cannibalism and to death. All of that happened for the ‘greater good’ of China — just as much of the activities of suppression that the present regime in Beijing is engaged in Tibet or elsewhere in China, is supposed to be
The author’s father was one of the 36 million unfortunate persons who had starved to death. But Yang did not connect the dots until three decades later. He considered his personal loss as an individual tragedy that had nothing to do with Mao’s Great leap Forward. In that period of over 30 years leading to his father’s demise and his growing up, he vehemently continued to believe in Mao’s programme that had unleashed the tragedy, and did his bit as a senior journalist with the Xinhua news agency to propagate the virtues of the programme. As it had happened with many others whom the system had overwhelmed with propaganda and misinformation, Yang too was dismissive of the small and muted rumblings of protest and considered them as aberrations of the Rightists and the bourgeoisie.
But once he began to dig deeper, he realised how wrong he had been, how great the tragedy had been and how inhuman Mao and his men had been. The result of Yang’s years of meticulous research is Tombstone — a tribute to his father and to the millions of others who perished from the Mao-made famine. But more than that, he says, “With this book I erect a tombstone anticipating the ultimate demise of the totalitarian system. Through it, later generations will know that there was once a system established at a certain juncture of history in the name of ‘liberating mankind’ that in reality enslaved humanity. This system promoted itself as the ‘road to Paradise’, but in fact it was the road to perdition.”
As he went deeper, Yang understood how the “People’s Republic of China combined a ruthless suppression of political dissent with a highly centralized planned economy to produce a system that Mao Zedong himself characterized as ‘Marx plus Qin Shihuang’. This combination of Soviet-style autocracy and ancient Chinese despotism resulted in an abuse of executive power…”
Our apologists who argue that China has changed a lot since those terrible years and has become more open (indeed!); that Mao is no longer that country’s guiding light (really!); and that raking up the past serves no purpose (how convenient!), must remember that the totalitarian regime for whose demise Yang has built a tombstone in advance, is still flourishing in China. Hu Jintao or Xi Jinping, it makes little difference to the edifice of that totalitarian form of governance. So long as a leader does not come along who has the courage and the vision to pull the totalitarian structure, China will live in the fear of another human tragedy. It need not be a famine, and it need not snuff out 36 million lives. It can be something ‘smaller’ — another Tiananmen massacre. Or it can be yet another brutal crackdown on protesters in Tibet.
The left-leaning apologists have yet another defence: “Please appreciate that the Chinese leadership has learnt valuable lessons from the (Mao-made) devastation, which is why there has not been a repeat of a similar tragedy. After all, even the greatest of leaders make mistakes.” Yes, except that the great leader Mao followed up the tragic Great leap Forward mistake with yet another tragedy — the Cultural Revolution. launched in 1966, it lasted until 1971 and inflicted untold torture and humiliation on the leaders who had dissented with Mao on the Great leap Forward. There was nothing cultured about the Cultural Revolution. It was a brutal and violent purge of dissidents; nothing less, nothing more.
Given such tumultuous past and the succession of totalitarian regimes since Mao’s time, Yang is not too optimistic about real change taking place. He quotes French sociologist Gustave le Bon: “A long time is necessary for ideas to establish themselves in the minds of crowds, but just as long a time is needed for them to be eradicated.” Based on the wisdom, Yang observes, “That is why it will take a very long time for a modern democratic system to be established in China.”