Author Nieman Fellows forbidden to leave China

A former journalist with China’s official news agency says he has been blocked from travelling to the US to accept a Harvard University prize for a 2008 book uncovering the devastating toll of the great Chinese famine of 1958-1961.

In December 2015, Harvard’s Nieman Fellows awarded Yang Jisheng for Tombstone, a 1,200-page account of the famine — which he estimated claimed at least 36m Chinese lives — and a decades-long government effort to whitewash one of the worst man-made disasters in history.

Although more recent leaders have permitted, and sometimes even encouraged, the re-evaluation of Mao-era policies, any substantial discussion of national traumas such as the Famine can be highly sensitive.