Tombstone: A Most Influential Work

Songlin Yang
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Songlin Yang: Henan Provincial Development Research Center

Chapter Chapter 11 in Telling the Truth: China’s Great Leap Forward, Household Registration and the Famine Death Tally, 2021, pp 181-193 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter is devoted to the refutation of Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, a book originally in Chinese but got translated into English because it is highly valued by commentators outside of China. Yang Songlin points out that Yang Jisheng’s “36 million famine victims” conclusion is not a result of mathematical computation at all but based on his review summing up of estimate by other witters. This chapter identifies where Yang Jisheng’s cherry-picking distorts evidence while ditching sources from the official data. Moreover, Yang uses a “blank-box” method—selecting death figures of provinces that he thinks useful for his argument and leaving the rest that does not support his number in blank. Examples of Yang Jisheng taking the number of total death of a particular place that he picks from, say, a county gazette, of the GLF period as the total famine toll, are aplenty.

Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-16-1661-7_11

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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-16-1661-7_11

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