In 1959 an 18-year-old student named Yang Jisheng was summoned home from his boarding school in central China by a friend who told him that his father was starving to death. Mr Yang returned immediately to his village, just in time to see his emaciated father before he died. The young idealist, already a member of the Communist Youth League, grieved deeply, but never thought to blame the government. "Compared with the advent of the great communist society," he writes, "what was my family's petty misfortune?"
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