Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14, 2008
He Won't Give In
By Jonathan Mirsky
Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China
by Kang Zhengguo, translated from the Chinese by Susan Wilf, with an introduction by Perry Link
Norton, 455 pp., $27.95
On June 4, 1989, having heard that the Tiananmen demonstrations had been lethally crushed, Kang Zhengguo, a professor of literature at a university in Shaanxi province, pinned a piece of paper to his chest displaying the words 'AIM YOUR GUNS HERE.' Then he joined with his students who were marching to protest the killings that had taken place in Beijing the night before. This open defiance of the Party and its most senior leaders was typical of Kang. 'I am incapable of saying what people want to hear,' he writes in his unique and sensitively written account of what it was like to grow up in Communist China from its beginnings in 1949 when he was five. 'In fact I regard it as my personal mission to speak the opposite.... Opposition is the motive force in the search for truth.'
Review, 3721 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |