Chinese journalist banned from flying to US to accept a prize for his work

A pioneering journalist who fought to expose the deaths of tens of millions of his fellow citizens in China’s Great Famine has been banned from leaving the country to accept a prize for his work in the United States.
Yang Jisheng, a retired correspondent from Beijing’s official news service Xinhua, was awarded Harvard University’s prestigious Louis M Lyons Award in December for his “ambitious and fearless reporting” on one of the 20th century’s deadliest man-made catastrophes.
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The prize, which Yang had hoped to collect at a ceremony in Massachusetts next month, was in recognition of his 2008 book Tombstone.

The 1,200-page work – considered the most authoritative account of a tragedy China’s Communist leaders still attempt to conceal – meticulously documents the horrific toll of the 1958-1961 famine in which the author estimates at least 36 million lives were lost, including that of his own father.

Announcing its decision to honour Yang last year, Harvard said it hoped to recognise courageous and dedicated journalists who were battling to “document the dark and difficult struggles of humankind”.
However, the Guardian understands that Xinhua, the state-run news agency for which Yang worked, has forbidden the 75-year-old author from travelling to the US to collect the award.
In a brief response to a faxed request for comment, a Xinhua spokesperson said: “[W]e never heard Mr Yang received an award, so we are not able to give you any response.”
In a statement, the co-chairs of the Lyons Award, Hamish Macdonald and Debra Adams Simmons, said: “We remain optimistic that Chinese journalist and author Yang Jisheng will be granted permission to travel to Harvard University on Thursday 10th March 2016 to accept the annual Louis M Lyons Award.
“We are following all necessary steps to enable Mr Yang to travel to Harvard in March. We have no formal indication of any problem and look forward to welcoming Mr Yang.”
Contacted by telephone on Monday, Yang, who lives in Beijing, declined to discuss the situation.
Yang Jisheng was born in the central province of Hubei in 1940, nine years before Chairman Mao’s communists seized power.
As a young man he was a committed member of the Communist party, which he joined in 1964. After graduating from Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University in 1966 he quickly secured a job at Xinhua where he worked until his retirement in 2001.
But Yang’s enthusiasm for the party faded as he journeyed across China on reporting trips and came to grasp the scale of the human tragedy Mao’s Great Leap Forward push for industrialisation had unleashed on his country.
“The chief culprit was Mao,” Yang later recalled in an interview.
In the early nineties, further disillusioned by the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, the journalist began secretly piecing together the famine’s hidden history as a way of remembering those who had died.
He roamed the country, surreptitiously building up an extensive body of first-hand interviews and documentary evidence about a disaster that has been described as China’s hidden Holocaust.