Yang Jisheng

He promptly joined Xinhua News Agency, where he worked until his retirement in 2001. His loyalty to the party was destroyed by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Although he continued working for the Xinhua News Agency, he spent much of his time researching for Tombstone. Yang used his role at the state-run Xinhua news agency to access provincial archives, beginning covert research on the Great Famine in the mid-1990s. Over a decade, he posed as studying grain policies, taking significant personal risks to secretly compile the first detailed account of the famine using Chinese government sources. Yang is also listed as a Fellow of China Media Project, a department under Hong Kong University.

• Piccap — Yang Jisheng in 2010 Yang

The Great Famine, which began in the late 1950s and claimed millions of lives across China, struck Yang Jisheng's family while he was away at boarding school. At 18, while working on a Communist Youth League newspaper, Yang was told by a friend that his father (actually his uncle, whom he regarded as a father) was starving. When he returned home, he found a desolate village—no animals remained, and even tree bark had been eaten. Although he brought rice for his father, Yang's efforts were in vain, as his father was too weak to eat and passed away three days later. "I didn't think my father's death was the country's fault. I thought it was my fault. If I hadn't gone to school, but had helped him dig up his crops, he wouldn't have died." Beginning in the early 1990s, Yang began interviewing people and collecting records of the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961, in which his own foster father had died, eventually accumulating ten million words of records. He published a two-volume 1,208-page account of the period, in which he aimed to produce an account that is authoritative and can stand up to the challenge of official denial by the Chinese government. He begins the book, "I call this book Tombstone. It is a tombstone for my [foster] father who died of hunger in 1959, for the 36 million Chinese who also died of hunger, for the system that caused their death, and perhaps for myself for writing this book." At first when I was writing this book, it was difficult. But then I became numb. When you are writing history, you can't be too emotional. You need to be calm and objective,' he says. 'But I was angry the whole time. I'm still angry. The book was published in Hong Kong and is banned in mainland China. Counterfeit copies of his book, along with photocopies and electronic versions, circulate widely, but Yang is unconcerned about copyright—his only wish is for the Chinese people to know their own history. "Our history is all fabricated. It's been covered up. If a country can't face its own history, then it has no future." In 2012 translations into French, German, and English (which has been condensed almost by 50%) have been published. He was reported to be banned from leaving China to receive the award in a ceremony in Harvard University to be held in March 2016.

Following the publication of Tombstone, Yang began to research the Cultural Revolution, the result of which was The World Turned Upside Down. Yang criticises the official portrayal of the Cultural Revolution, asserting that Mao actually "fully intended to topple enemies in the bureaucratic clique who stood in the way of his utopia" but later "abandoned the rebels and restored the purged bureaucratic clique". Yang also critiques the narrative that Liu Shaoqi was a mere passive victim of the reprisals of the era rather than a participant in the power struggle, and asserts that the hardships created by the bureaucracy vastly exceeded those created by the rebel faction.