People of the Revolution and the USSR

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1940–

The Xinhua reporter who lost his father to the famine and, in Tombstone, documented 36 million Great Famine deaths

A Xinhua reporter who from the mid-1990s raided provincial archives to compile the first detailed account of the Great Famine, published in 2008 as Tombstone: 36 million dead.

From Hubei, he watched his adoptive father starve in the Great Leap famine of 1959 without knowing it was a nationwide disaster. As a Xinhua reporter he began in the 1990s to search archives and interview survivors across the country, and after more than a decade published Tombstone in Hong Kong in 2008. The book estimates about 36 million famine deaths in 1958–1962 and traces them to the communes, forced procurement and “anti-rightist” politics; it is banned on the mainland. His history of the Cultural Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, followed in 2016. He was deputy publisher of the journal Yanhuang Chunqiu.