Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine

This is a true story about what happens when corruption and lies run rampart - more people died in the Great famine than civilians died in WW2, yet this isn´t a story of evil - but cheer incompetence and what happens when there is no free press and when the authority has such control that people can´t even move to tell the truth and those that tell the truth gets beaten, many times to death and their children starve to death because of the lie. An example of why this happend is Wu Zhipzu and that was a friend of Mao and really wanted to make an impression. That and the Pan, Yang and Wang incident made him all but immune to criticism. The Pan, Yang and Wang itself is a story as most outlandish example of bullying in history - and it was architect was Wu Zhipzu, 1.6 billion posters denouncing those 3 men was just a mere start. Wu enforced many things that harmed the crop yield, but main cause of the starvation was his claim that these things did the opposite increasing the outpot of Henan provinces crop yield 2.4 times. The result of these elevated estimates was a procurement quota of nearly 41% of the actual meaning nothing was left to the farmers and their families and they were even beaten because it was believed they were hiding food when they could give up enough. And the tragedy didn´t stay in the Henan province because of the status of that province as the vanguard of the new system. And of course... in the end Wu wasn´t punished - even though hardly anyone has caused more death than that man. The book is a damn hard read, but essential. The "hard" part is the content not the way it is written - because Yang Jisheng doesn´t shy away from what happened to victims - his foster father was one of them.