Jiabiangou was a labor reform farm in Jiuquan County, Gansu Province, where "rightist" prisoners were held. October 1957, nearly 3,000 educated people were detained there. In October 1961, when the higher-ups corrected the "left-leaning" mistakes of the Gansu Provincial Party Committee and began repatriating the rightist prisoners, less than half had survived.
Writer Yang Xianhui spent five years interviewing more than a hundred people and brought to light the truth that had been sealed for more than forty years. Originally published by Tianjin Ancient Books Publishing House in 2002, this book also includes other short and medium-sized stories by Yang Xianhui.
After the disaster in Dingxi Prefecture, which was the hardest-hit area of Gansu Province during the 1958-1960 famine, a children's welfare institution was urgently set up in Dingxi Prefecture to take in hundreds of orphans. During the same period, children's welfare centers or "kindergartens" were set up in all counties and towns in Dingxi Prefecture, as well as in the people's communes in the hardest-hit counties. These children's welfare centers, large and small, housed about 5,000 orphans. On the basis of faithful historical facts and statements by the parties concerned, this book brings tragic scenes of starvation and death before people's eyes using straightforward description, documentary language, and a down-to-earth tone of voice.
The author of this book, Luo Pinghan, is a native of Anhua County, Hunan Province. He graduated from the Party History Department of Renmin University of China and served as director and professor of the Party History Teaching and Research Department of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. This book was published by Fujian People's Publishing House in 2003.
With Mao Zedong's affirmation, the system of people's communes was rapidly promoted across the country in 1958. At that time, the people's commune was both a production organization and a grassroots political power. Its rise and fanatical development are closely related to the subsequent Great Famine.
As a scholar within the system, the author’s view of history also belongs to orthodox ideology. Although this book is narrated from the official ideology of the CCP, it uses rich and detailed historical materials to comprehensively and systematically introduce the history of the People's Communes, giving it a reference value for a comprehensive understanding of this movement.
The years 1959-1961 were very unusual in the history of disasters in China and the world in the 20th century. Anyone who has experienced it will recall the starvation years and the days when people starved to death everywhere. However, due to official concealment and denial, the number of people who died in this disaster has never been officially announced.
The purpose of Jin Hui's article is to estimate the number of unnatural deaths during the three years of the 1959-1961 disaster in China. Based on public data released by the authoritative National Bureau of Statistics in China Jin concludes that about 40 million people died, which roughly matches studies by foreign scholars, who have estimated up to 45 million.
