Volume 40, Number 7 · April 8, 1993
An Unnatural Disaster
By Liu Binyan, Translated by Perry Link
Lishi de yibufen (A Part of History)
by Zheng Yi
Tianyuan Publishers Wan-hsiang Book Co.
Hongse Jinianbei (Red Memorial)
by Zheng Yi
Unpublished Manuscript
It took twenty-four years for the news of the shocking facts about cannibalism in China's Guangxi Autonomous Region in southern China to reach the ears of the world. Most of the Chinese people know nothing of the truth even today. Similarly the grim truth about China's great famine of the early 1960s, which snuffed out more than 30 million lives, has continued to be sealed off from the Chinese people. The remarkable success of the Communist government's propaganda can be seen in the fact that nearly all Chinese people continue to refer to that huge famine as 'the three years of natural disaster' or 'the three-year period of difficulty.' These are euphemisms for man-made catastrophe on a scale seldom seen in world history. But what does the ordinary Chinese citizen know of it? At most, only the tiny part that he or she experienced personally.
Review, 4683 words
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