It must not be common for a nearly 700-page book to appear in translation some eighty-three years after its publication. But then, the staying power of this work reflects the extraordinary life of its author, Yunte Deng, also known as Deng Tuo (1912–66), who wrote it a decade before becoming a founding editor of People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party. In some respects, the book is in the spirit of the didactic texts on good governance by scholar-officials of China's imperial period.1 In others, it broke new ground nearly a century ago in its political framing of China's stubborn scourge of mass starvation for new generations of intellectuals.
Impressively compiled in haste at graduate school in 1930s Kaifeng, amid a surge of disaster-related deaths in the Nationalist Republic, Deng's work sought to correct a host of problems that he saw in famine studies up to...
