Reading Blog: May 2022
Due to the length and complexity of Tombstone, it was my main book for May.
Also a coworker lent me a book on fungi, so I read it before leaving on my trip.
After watching Who Killed Malcolm X? on Netflix, I did some background reading and ordered Finding W. D. Fard from the publisher (Amazon is expensive). That’ll be a future read, but I don’t know when.
Tombstone: An Account of Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (Yang Jisheng, 2008; 2013 translation)
Yang writes a history of the unprecedented famine that killed 36 million people during the Great Leap Forward.
The book begins with the author’s own story: being called home to his adoptive father’s deathbed, his regret and hurt, then returning to school and continuing on in the communist youth system. He would become disillusioned later — the Cultural Revolution, discovering that the famine had not been a local tragedy but a disastrous policy nationwide, and filtering the news for his job at Xinhua.
Even though nearly all families lost people to the famine, it remains a censored subject, and no one had assembled historical accounts and investigations of blame like this before. The silence continues, as Chinese authorities banned the book and blocked Yang from leaving in 2016.
The story of the famine is one of being pushed toward a cliff. The national drives for farm collectivization, urbanization, public works, and trading wheat surplus to the USSR did not allow for any pushback or moderation, so everyone in the chain of command reported bountiful harvests, then were given quotas based on that amount. Starting in the late 90s, Yang connected with older Xinhua colleagues, local archives, and various sources to recall what they hadn’t been able to report at the time. Thousands had been beaten to death for under-promising, under-delivering, or failing to recover missing grain. In past famines people might be able to ration or forage for themselves, but collective kitchens and coercive policies had taken over: mismanaging food, requiring people to continue on intense non-agricultural work, even banning fires in homes. The collective kitchens formed with a fraction of the animals and tools which the community previously held (as in The Silent Steppe, many farmers melted down tools and slaughtered animals if they were being taken away; also this book explained how collective kitchens needed large pots and lumber instead of smaller home fires). Communal farms also had to make do without the strongest workers, who had been sent to public works or iron-forging projects.
In multiple areas, 1 in 3 people did not survive the famine years, and there were cases of cannibalism.
There were people who anticipated a food shortage, spoke up, moved their families, refused harmful ‘innovations’ in farming techniques, and mailed accounts to higher-ups, but local commune leadership (cadres) were too often focused on protecting their own food and position. In Henan Province, over 100,000 people were detained and mail was censored during the famine.
Yang has extraordinary access to sources (for example, an exaggerated report of new farming practices, followed by interviewing the original reporter; or verifying details with a former official and his wife in retirement).
Though there are personal accounts, each one is a short snapshot, and much of the book relies on news, statistics, editorials, and interactions between officials. In some ways this is a book about middle management under absolute dictatorship? Again and again, the state only uses its tools for violence and reinforcing the original ideology to appease those higher up the chain, rather than working on the core problem.
At the top of the chain, the question of Mao’s knowledge is a big one for Tombstone; Yang faces this directly.
Memos show that Mao sent investigators, reviewed roughly accurate reports, and was directly confronted by his cousins about conditions in his hometown. In each case, Mao and the State Council decided that there was landlord-backed subversion, and ordered political investigations.
When Premier Zhou Enlai warned against acting too quickly as “rash advance,” Mao rebuked him in public and in private until Zhou wrote multiple sweeping apologies.
Communal farms and restructuring families were projects close to Mao’s core goals in developing communism. When farmers resisted communes after their appearance in 1957, Mao urged quickly rebuilding and reorganizing. Despite exasperatedly asking for honesty in 1958, Mao did not allow dissent. A former close revolutionary (defense minister Peng Dehuai) brought a letter with his observations about communal farms to Mao at the 1959 Lushan Conference. Mao cc’d everyone, and removed Peng and allies from leadership (Wikipedia describes Peng’s later run through reappointment, imprisonment and torture during the Cultural Revolution, and modern image in China).
These brutal crackdowns made it significantly harder for communes to show any flexibility or to dissolve again as the famine intensified.
Areas of the book which were less clear:
- There is only one brief mention of the Four Pests Campaign, which was the one piece of this story I had heard in school. I’m wondering if it was deemed less consequential, if the book is more focused on people’s treatment of each other, or if it’s in the same vein as other-ing stories about North Korean people.
- The preface / notes explain that a two-volume book was abridged and rearranged to make this translation manageable for foreign readers. Some important political / ideological details (the Three Red Banners and farm communes) appear a little later and provenance of tables of death statistics come at the end. At multiple times I felt that an aside (the history of a canal, a comment about communal farms appealing to young Maoists who could stop taking orders from their fathers), was valuable but out of place.
- The most detailed parts of the book focus on specific counties within a few provinces. I didn’t know if these were selected because they were the hardest-hit, or for the detailed information (NPR explains that in the unabridged Chinese version, readers can look up their own province).
—
In 2021, Yang Jisheng published a book on the Cultural Revolution — “The World Turned Upside Down”. We owe him a debt for continuing to document despite the negative attention and restrictions it brings.
There’s a layering to censorship and suppression, where the internal machinations and signals and flexes are hidden to outsiders. We saw this recently when a Uyghur athlete helped light the torch for the Olympics, or in news surrounding Jack Ma, Peng Shuai, and Fan Bingbing. It’s very important to the establishment in mainland China and Hong Kong to show one image, even when transparently there is conflict and censorship.
I don’t want anyone to run with this book as symbolic of modern China. The famine is its own historical event. Modern Chinese state power is a thing and much more defined by surveillance and finance than in the Mao era. Really, this book is not about something that you saw on Twitter yesterday.
In other media
Yang Jisheng appears in this documentary ‘Mao’s Great Famine’ from 2012.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures (Merlin Sheldrake, 2020)
In some parts of the internet, there has been an explosion of interest in mushrooms, their niche in the environment, and medical and psychedelic use. Though this is isn’t a common term I’ll describe ‘pop mycology’ as a social media-heavy movement which embraces mushrooms, but buys into more new age themes like ‘science is ignoring this’, ‘nature is super advanced,’ ‘in balance with nature’, ‘develop a business with us’, and ‘this is traditional and natural medicine’.
Entangled Life is a tour of the fungi world from a biologist, and it’s a popular recommendation in the pop mycology world. We get snapshots of the author in field research, in a clinical trial of psilocybin, and on a truffle hunt, mixed in with details of the microscopic world where fungi find each other, ensnare nematodes, and send off pheromone signals. Some truffle hunters double as scientists; one identified 200 new species (this reminded me of a recent talk on DIY mushroom DNA barcoding).
I also liked to read about horizontal gene transfer, some blends of garam masala containing stone flower (a lichen), mycologist Beatrix Potter, the argument to stop classifying fungi into species, and other little discoveries.
I was confused by a part about neuron-like signals in mycelium being rarely studied or first recognized in the 1990s. Googling a bit, there is a 1965 paper on Electrical Properties of Neurospora crassa and in 1976 “Action potentials” in Neurospora crassa (also note the name Neurospora). Opening up Adamatzky’s “Towards fungal computer” paper, it looks like another 1976 “Action potentials” paper gets cited, so the history is garbled in between the paper, book research, and the final text.
This isn’t the only time that Sheldrake falls into over-selling mushrooms. When reading revelations about fungi in Chernobyl or in oil spills, the reader might believe that they could resolve our garbage problems or chemical disasters, but (a) specialized fungi flourish in these areas because competitors are killed off, not because they are Earth’s little helpers and (b) fungi are already dissipating these chemicals; it’s misleading to think they were missing before or can be dropped in for a super-accelerated cleanup.
The book also is too easy to repeat vague ideas from others (e.g. when a truffle hunter tells Sheldrake that biblical manna was the desert truffle).
While fact-checking, I was disappointed again by Wikipedia. It’s still difficult to find basic information about mycelium, and easy for individuals to drop in their interests (all in the article: fake leather, packaging, furniture, biological filters, a link to a longer Wikipedia article on ‘mycoremediation’ , erosion of logging roads, compost’s role in organic farming).
I want to read more about horizontal gene transfer. Is The Tangled Tree good? What about The Epigenetics Revolution? Any recent books putting these concepts together to make a Post-Mendelian Genetics Add-on Pack?
Updates to Previous Reads
- The Gates Foundation’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa shared a report that despite success with policy makers and private partnerships, “the profitability of the majority of AGRA-supported business models is still unclear”. Critics of old and renewed Green Revolution policies read this and other statistics as an admission of the program’s flaws (Timothy Wise’s critique in text and podcast form). I haven’t read the report yet.
- Nat Friedman, GitHub’s former CEO, tweeted about ‘A Chemical Hunger’. Is this report gaining popularity in tech circles or alt-health-y circles?
- This Roman bust that turned up in Austin, TX was looted from a German museum. This story tells a bit about how the buyer figured that out and worked on a plan to repatriate it.
