Tombstone

by Gloria Davies
Tombstone by Yang Jisheng Photo: youtube.com

Tombstone by Yang Jisheng
Photo: youtube.com

Yang Jisheng 杨继绳, former editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu magazine, is the author of Tombstone 墓碑, a detailed and richly sourced documentation of the Great Famine of 1958–1961. The book was never published or legally distributed in mainland China, but released in Hong Kong in 2008. An English translation was published in 2012.

In December 2015, Yang was awarded the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism by the Nieman Fellows at Harvard. He was invited to Harvard to accept the award in March 2016, but in February 2016, Yang said that his former employer, Xinhua News Agency, had forbidden him from travelling to the ceremony. In 2015, Yang travelled to Sweden to accept the Stieg Larsson prize, and in 2013, he had travelled to the United States to receive the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize.