THE GREAT FAMINE IN CHINA: THE FAMINE THAT KILLED UP TO 45 MILLION PEOPLE REMAINS A TABOO SUBJECT IN CHINA.

the great famine in China: The famine that killed up to 45 million people remains a taboo subject in China 50 years on, 

an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years.

China’s Great Famine: the true story

The famine that killed up to 45 million people remains a taboo subject in China 50 years on. Author Yang Jisheng is determined to change that with his book, Tombstone

Small and stocky, neat in dress and mild of feature, Yang Jisheng is an unassuming figure as he bustles through the pleasantly shabby offices, an old-fashioned satchel thrown over one shoulder. 

Since his retirement from China's state news agency he has worked at the innocuously titled Annals of the Yellow Emperor journal, where stacks of documents cover chipped desks and a cockroach circles our paper cups of green tea.

Yet the horror stories penned by the 72-year-old from this comforting, professorial warren in Beijing are so savage and excessive they could almost be taken as the blackest of comedies; the bleakest of farces; the most extreme of satires on fanaticism and tyranny.

A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land.

 In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years.

 In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown.

 In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. 

Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. 

A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village's 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. 

Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.

When the head of a production brigade dares to state the obvious – that there is no food – a leader warns him: "That's right-deviationist thinking. You're viewing the problem in an overly simplistic matter."

Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability.

 But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.

The Great Famine remains a taboo in China, where it is referred to euphemistically as the Three Years of Natural Disasters or the Three Years of Difficulties. 

Yang's monumental account, first published in Hong Kong, is banned in his homeland.

He had little idea of what he would find when he started work: "I didn't think it would be so serious and so brutal and so bloody.

 I didn't know that there were thousands of cases of cannibalism. I didn't know about farmers who were beaten to death.

"People died in the family and they didn't bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. 

People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. 

In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. 

And they ate their own children. Terrible. Too terrible."

To start with, I felt terribly depressed when I was reading these documents," he adds. "But after a while I became numbed – because otherwise I couldn't carry on."

Whether it is due to this process, or more likely his years working within the system, Yang is absolutely self-possessed.

 His grandfatherly smile is intermittently clipped by caution as he answers a question. 

Though a sense of deep anger imbues his book, it is all the more powerful for its restraint.

"There's something about China that seems to require sharp-elbowed intellectuals," says Jo Lusby, head of China operations for Penguin, the publishers of Tombstone.

 "But the people with the loudest voices aren't necessarily the ones with the most interesting things to say. 

Yang Jisheng comes across as a sweet old man, but he has a core of steel. He has complete integrity."

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