Back to 1942 chronicles a famine with multiple contributing factors and devastating effects during the Second Sino-Japanese war. The story is told from the official perspective of reporters, generals, politicians, and real families whose lives were forever altered by drastic measures they were forced to take in order to survive.
**The Chinese Nationalist government of the time is depicted as alternately ignoring the dire nature of the famine and its subsequent exodus of millions of people from the Hunen province, and minimizing its devastation to the outside world. The government appears to be overburdened by ongoing war efforts and corruption in the distribution of relief supplies.
**Policy and private life are portrayed as worlds apart in stopping the devastation. The portrayals of those who lived to tell the tale and their accounts of those who were not so lucky, of whom there were many (3 million), highlight the true impact of the famine.
This is a true story based upon Liu Zhenyun's novel "Remembering 1942." Zhenyun himself is the descendant of a survivor of the 1942 famine, and his family story is poignantly portrayed, showing heroism, self-sacrifice, terrible misfortune, and the ultimate survival of the lucky few.