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Author : Jasper Becker
About the book from cover jacket
In the tradition of John Hersey's Hiroshima, journalist Jasper
Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers
the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. Hungry
Ghosts is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror,
cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap
Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone wrong. This is
the unforgettable story of the century's greatest human rights
disaster, in which more people died than in Stalin's purges and
the Holocaust put together.
Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed
in painstaking detective work to examine the unprecedented madness
that plagued China between 1958 and 1962. For the first time
since it was so ruthlessly and categorically erased from history,
Becker unearths what really happened during these years, and how
the famine and terror could have been kept a secret for so long.
In the name of communist progress, the peasant population was
organized into communes where they were forced to work for the
common good producing steel and other necessities, whose
manufacture they misunderstood and hopelessly bungled. Dams,
canals and irrigation systems were constructed, but because they
were based on faulty plans, and built mostly by ignorant farmers,
they collapsed quickly, caused massive crop failure, and
precipitated a famine of unimaginable proportions. As the populace
began to starve, they deserted their homes and former farms in mad
searches for food, and finally resorted to cannibalism, slavery,
and other atrocities that marked this period as the most barbaric
in Chinese history. Meanwhile, Mao's followers were too scared to
tell the truth. Any officials who dared oppose reforms were
ousted, and more vociferous dissenters were tortured, sent to
labor camps, or executed. Until now, news of this debacle failed
to reach the West. For three decades, the Chinese government has
managed to suppress nearly all evidence of its existence.
Finally unraveling the mystery, Becker recounts in chilling detail
the government's absurd attempts to cast its efforts as
"successful" and presents the disturbing tales of hundreds of
survivors. Hungry Ghosts is a landmark of investigative
journalism, the first complete chronicle of one of the greatest
human tragedies of our time.
JASPER BECKER, currently Beijing Bureau Chief for the South China
Morning Post, has written extensively on Chinese affairs for The
Guardian, The Economist, and The Spectator. He lives in Beijing.
Publisher : The Free Press
A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
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