After I finished reading Yang Jisheng's book, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962, an extensive analysis on the worst man-made calamity in human history, I couldn't help but wonder: If Yang's book were required reading for American college students, would so many young people embrace socialism so enthusiastically? Yang opens the book with his father's death in 1959.
Since his school was far from the village where his father lived, Yang rarely saw his father during the school year.
At the little hut his father lived in, Yang saw his father's "Eyes sunken and lifeless, his face gaunt, the skin creased and flaccid," which reminded Yang of the human skeleton he saw in an anatomy class.
Yang suddenly realized that "The term skin and bones referred to something so horrible and cruel." Yang tried to feed his father some peanut sprouts-the only thing he could find-but his father was too weak to even swallow.
Despite losing his father to starvation, Yang "Felt no suspicion and completely accepted what had been instilled in me by the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League." Since the founding of Communist China in 1949, the CCP had sealed China off from the outside world.
Only years later, when Yang became a journalist at Xinhua News, did Yang begin to have doubts.
Yang originally wanted to title his well-researched book "The Road to Paradise," but he changed the title to "Tombstone" for three reasons: He wanted to erect a tombstone for his father, for the 36 million Chinese people who perished in the famine, and he wished to bury socialism, the ideology that has inflicted so much suffering on Chinese people.
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
As Americans Turn Left, We Should Remember Socialism Killed 36 Million Chinese
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