Yang Jisheng

Yang Jisheng (Chinese杨继 绳/杨继 绳, Pinyin Yáng Jisheng; * November 1940 ) is a Chinese journalist who lives in Beijing.

Life

Yang Jisheng studied at Tsinghua University in Beijing. It was in 1964 a member of the Communist Party of China. After graduating, he became a journalist in 1966 and propagandist of the communist regime in the state news agency Xinhua, for which he worked until 2001. After that, he was a Chinese history magazine publisher until 2008 and has published several books. The book on the reform era and the Tiananmen Square Massacre also contains three interviews with Zhao Ziyang, which he led in whose house arrest with him. A collection of his reportages appeared in 2010. The University of Hong Kong won him in 2007 as a Visiting Fellow for their journalism training and co-authored a publication.

In the late 1980s he began secretly with research on the famine and the mass extinction at the time of the Great Leap Forward of China between 1958 and 1962. As a high-ranking government journalist he had in the provinces of China's access to experts and archives whose local statistics and he studies aggregated to estimate a figure of 36 million starving people. For Yang Jisheng, the causes lie in his early Chinese policy, while the official policy today still speaks of natural disasters as the cause. Yang Jishengs monograph was published in 2008 in Hong Kong and was translated into German in 2012. The title of grave stone should also remember his father, who in 1959 was one of the victims.

Writings

• Grave stone - Mùbei. The Great Chinese famine from 1958 to 1962. Translated from the Chinese by Hans Peter Hoffmann. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2012, ISBN 978-3-10-080023-7.