The most provocative came from Lin Zhibo, an editor at the party's mouthpiece newspaper People's Daily, who posted a message on his Weibo accusing Mao-bashers of "[fabricating] lies about the deaths of tens of millions of people from 1960 to 1962." His message was immediately picked up and reposted by tens of thousands of Weibo users, who poured out disbelief and outrage.

"Since Lin Zhibo can deny the Great Famine, it is no surprise the Japanese can deny the Nanking Massacre!" Weibo user Hongludianyue wrote.

"Because of [Lin's comment]...I brought up this bitter episode to my dad tonight, and his voice grew louder, mixed with anger and sorrow," huzizfl wrote. "Calling it natural disaster is to excuse the government for its crime! When the fifty-cents are singing their praise for the party, go ask if the ghosts of the tens of millions of innocent victims will agree!" "Fifty-cents" refers to Internet commentators hired by the Chinese government to post messages that advance the party line in an attempt to shape and sway public discussion. They are said to be paid 50 cents per post.

"Lin Zhibo has daringly torn off the scab over the great historical scar and educated the public about the Great Famine," yemeicun, suggested half-mockingly. "Maybe he is actually a spy from our side?"

Lin at first attempted to defend himself on Weibo, but soon surrendered to public outrage and posted an apology, in which he claimed to have been ignorant of historical facts and was "deeply shocked by what [he has] learned" from netizens' responses.

The apology, brushed off by most web users, has only intensified the Weibo discussion on the deadliest catastrophe in modern Chinese history, and pushed the talk into print media, which is typically censored heavily. Southern People Weekly, a magazine under the Chinese media mogul Southern Daily Media Group, ran an 18-page, in-depth feature on the Great Famine, complete with detailed personal accounts and vivid photos. "Sometimes history is divided into two parts: history itself and the 'admitted history,' " the article reads. "For the new generation, the history of the Great Famine is like a tale ... if we don't save it, it will surely be lost."

Discussions online and in print have focused on two things: estimating the death toll and recounting personal stories from the period. Because official historical research has been so limited, the number of casualties is still murky (some estimates put it somewhere between 32.5 million and 40 million). But, in many ways, this resurgent national conversation is as much about surfacing the human side of these events as it is about reckoning with the past. Web users who have rushed to share their family experiences on social media are helping their society reconstruct a period of history that had been left to fade. Accounts of subsisting on weeds and bark, of watching relatives die, and of cannibalism, posted on Weibo, have validated the memories of those who lived through the catastrophe and informed those who have had little exposure to it.