Hard facts and half-truths: The new archival history of China’s Great Famine

Abstract

This article reviews two recent monographs on the history of the Great Leap famine. Yang Jisheng’s Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai da jihuang jishi (Tombstone: A chronicle of the Great Famine in China in the 1960s) was published in Hong Kong in 2008, and an abridged English translation was released in 2012. A monograph on the famine by Frank Dikötter was published in 2010, and a collection of documents on the famine translated by Dikötter’s long-term collaborator Zhou Xun was published in 2012. The monographs by Yang and Dikötter both present plausible accounts of the policies and institutional structures that gave rise to the famine, and provide many vivid descriptions of the suffering at the village level during the period of the famine. This review reflects critically on the nature of the sources cited and the methodologies deployed in the two books. Special attention is paid to the problem of the representativeness of evidence drawn from archival and other sources.