Yang Jisheng (journalist)

Yang Jisheng
Yang Jisheng in 2010
Traditional Chinese楊繼繩
Simplified Chinese杨继绳
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinYáng Jìshéng
In this Chinese name, the family name is Yang.

Yang Jisheng (born November 1940)[1][2] is a Chinese journalist and author. His work include Tombstone (墓碑), a comprehensive account of the Great Chinese Famine during the Great Leap Forward, and The World Turned Upside Down (天地翻覆), a history of the Cultural Revolution. Yang joined the Communist Party in 1964 and graduated from Tsinghua University in 1966. He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until his retirement in 2001. His loyalty to the party was destroyed by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.[3]

Although he continued working for the Xinhua News Agency, he spent much of his time researching for Tombstone. Yang used his role at the state-run Xinhua news agency to access provincial archives, beginning covert research on the Great Famine in the mid-1990s. Over a decade, he posed as studying grain policies, taking significant personal risks to secretly compile the first detailed account of the famine using Chinese government sources.[4] As of 2008, he was the deputy editor of the journal Yanhuang Chunqiu in Beijing.[1][5] Yang is also listed as a Fellow of China Media Project, a department under Hong Kong University.[5]

  1. ^ a b "A hunger for the truth: A new book, banned on the mainland, is becoming the definitive account of the Great Famine." Archived 27 April 2009 at the Wayback Machine, chinaelections.org, 7 July 2008
  2. ^ "Chinese author of book on famine braves risks to inform new generations" by Verna Yu, International Herald Tribune, 18 December 2008
  3. ^ Johnson, Ian (22 November 2012). "China: Worse Than You Ever Imagined". New York Review of Books. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 16 September 2020.
  4. ^ Lim, Louisa (10 November 2012). "A Grim Chronicle of China's Great Famine". NPR.
  5. ^ a b "Yang Jisheng" Archived 27 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine at the China Media Project, Hong Kong University, October 2007 (accessed 9 March 2008)