When I was a small girl I read a book about a mountain nurse in Tibet. The place seemed impossibly far away: high trails, hard journeys, people who needed someone brave enough to go and help.
Years later I learned what had been done to Tibet, and the wish turned into a question I still cannot answer. I am seventy-one. I still do not understand why the world treated it as settled.
That is why 1 October 1949 matters to me.
On that day Mao Zedong stood on a balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square and proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China. The civil war was not quite finished, but the Nationalist government had withdrawn to Taiwan and the Communists controlled most of mainland China.
And Tibet was on borrowed time. Only they did not it yet.
What followed was not simply the consolidation of a new government.
It was a succession of campaigns whose human cost would eventually be measured in the tens of millions.
Less than a year later, Chinese forces entered the Korean War. The intervention prevented the collapse of North Korea and ended in a stalemate along roughly the pre-war line.
Then came The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, attempted to transform China at extraordinary speed. Agriculture was collectivised. Local officials were pressured to report spectacular production figures. Grain was procured on the basis of those figures, leaving communities without adequate reserves.
The result was famine on a staggering scale.
The precise number of deaths remains disputed. Estimates vary, but there is no serious dispute that millions upon millions died between 1959 and 1961, with many demographic studies placing the excess deaths in the tens of millions.
The causes were not simply bad weather. Government policy, unrealistic procurement quotas, suppression of private plots and markets, and the political consequences of admitting failure all played major roles.
Alongside this grew the system of reform through labour, where political opponents, alleged rightists, former landlords and others considered unreliable could be sent to farms, mines and construction projects. The records are incomplete, and the exact human toll remains difficult to establish.
Then came the Cultural Revolution.
Beginning in 1966, the campaign against the “Four Olds”- old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits - turned political zeal against people as well as their inheritance. Temples, books, genealogies, historic buildings and cultural artefacts were attacked or destroyed. People were beaten, imprisoned, humiliated and sometimes driven to suicide. Factional violence added another layer of suffering.
And there was Tibet.
When I was that little girl reading about the mountain nurse, I knew nothing of the politics surrounding Tibet. I knew only mountains and adventure, and the romantic idea that there were people in a distant land who needed help.
Chinese forces entered eastern Tibetan regions in 1950 and defeated Tibetan forces at Chamdo. The following year the Seventeen Point Agreement was imposed. Resistance grew, particularly in eastern Tibet, and culminated in the Lhasa uprising of 1959. The Dalai Lama fled to India.
What followed included imprisonment, executions, suppression of resistance and profound disruption of Tibetan religious and cultural life. Monasteries were closed or destroyed, and a society that had developed its own traditions over centuries was subjected to revolutionary transformation.
The precise numbers are disputed, as they are elsewhere in this history.
But we do not need a perfect number to know that something terrible happened.
And that brings me back to the little girl who read about a mountain nurse in Tibet. I could not understand why the world would stand by while people suffered.
And this is where Gareth Jones returns to the story.
Jones had already seen what happened when a government controlled not merely the food supply but the story told about that food.
During the Holodomor in Ukraine, millions of people died in a famine created and intensified by Soviet policies. Grain was taken from starving communities. Movement was restricted. The reality of the famine was denied or concealed.
Jones went to see for himself. He saw the starving. And then he tried to tell the world.
That is what makes his story so important.
He was not merely reporting a famine. He was challenging a manufactured version of reality.
The people were hungry for food.
The outside world was hungry for the truth.
And the state stood between them.
The Holodomor and the famine of the Great Leap Forward were not identical events. They occurred in different countries, under different governments and in different historical circumstances. We should be careful not to turn history into a collection of convenient parallels.
But there is a thread worth following.
Who controls the supply?
In the Holodomor, the state controlled the grain.
It also controlled the information.
The people who were starving could not simply leave, and the people outside the famine were not allowed to understand its full extent. The same problem of political control over information appeared in Mao's China, where admitting failure could itself become a political offence.
And now we arrive at our own time.
The modern world is not a Ukrainian village in 1933. It is not China in 1959.
The comparison must not be exaggerated.
But there is another kind of hunger.
People hunger for knowledge. They want to understand what is happening around them. We want to know what happened before we were born. They want to hear uncomfortable accounts as well as comfortable ones.
And yet words themselves can be rationed.
Information can be filtered, censored, restricted, buried, redefined or simply made so difficult to find that people eventually stop looking for it.
The starving body knows that it is hungry.
A mind can be taught to believe it has been fed.
That is a very different kind of starvation.
But the mouths are still there.
We are still eager for sustenance.
In the modern world, words are becoming the food that was withheld back then.
A hungry mind needs information in much the same way a hungry body needs food. Not literally, of course. The consequences are not the same. But the human need to receive something essential from outside ourselves remains.
And that is why the question troubles me.
We live in a world where people will quite rightly campaign passionately for a threatened frog, an endangered newt or a disappearing species. We should care about such things.
But I still struggle with the silence that can greet the deliberate silencing, erasure or “cancellation” of human beings - their histories, their cultures, their memories and sometimes their very existence.
Perhaps the little girl who read about a mountain nurse was not entirely wrong.
Perhaps she simply believed that when people were in danger, other people would care.
At seventy-one, I still believe they should.
Because the Holodomor taught us what happens when a government controls the food. Gareth Jones showed us the danger of a government controlling the story.
And the lesson I take from both is painfully simple:
When those who control the supply decide what the hungry are permitted to receive, hunger itself can become a weapon.
When truth becomes a ration, freedom has already begun to starve.
Shaydee
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