A Dual Review of Tombstone and Mao's Great Famine
(Note: I’m traveling in China right now, where I don’t have access to my own blog. I have to ask someone else outside to put this post up for me. It was a surprise to me, though, that LA Review of Booksis also blocked. I don’t know why and doubt that there was a particular reason, but now with my following review published, the Chinese government might indeed feel the need. Sigh. )
That reaction highlights both the main contribution and main limitation of Dikötter’s book. Though there have been many books and articles published on the same subject — in English, Chinese, and I’m sure other languages — apparently Dikötter’s is the one that brought awareness to at least one more Westerner ignorant of the catastrophe. On the other hand, Dikötter’s attempt to draw parallels between the Mao-era famine that swept over the entirety of mainland China from 1959 to 1961 and killed tens of millions, the Holocaust, and the Soviet Gulag is, at best, an over-simplification that hinders understanding. To borrow what the discerning Asia scholar Ian Buruma once said on a different subject: “To distinguish between atrocities does not diminish the horror, but without clarity on these matters history recedes into myth and becomes a form of propaganda.”
The most authoritative study on the famine is Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, which has a broader and deeper perspective. The Chinese language edition of the book was published in Hong Kong two years before Dikötter’s, and an English version is due out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in fall 2012.
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