Last summer I took a trip to Xinyang, a rural area of wheat fields and tea plantations in central China’s Henan province (...) The Xinyang Incident is the subject of the first chapter of
Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962, the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng’s epic account of the worst famine in history. Yang conservatively estimates that 36 million people died of unnatural causes, mostly due to starvation but also government-instigated torture, writes Ian Johnson, a Beijing-based writer.
Read more
