Volume 52, Number 15 · October 6, 2005
China: The Uses of Fear
By Jonathan Mirsky
Tiananmen Follies: Prison Memoirs and Other Writings
by Dai Qing,translated and edited by Nancy Yang Liu, Peter Rand, and Lawrence R. Sullivan, with a foreword by Ian Buruma
EastBridge, 162 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Instilling deadly fear throughout the population was one of Mao Zedong's lasting contributions to China since the late Twenties. In the case of Dai Qing, one of China's sharpest critics before 1989, fear seems to explain the sad transformation in her writing that is evident but never clearly acknowledged in Tiananmen Follies. Arrested, she confessed and was set free; her writing about the regime then took a different turn.
Review, 4794 words
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