Volume 55, Number 5 · April 3, 2008
He Would Have Changed China
By Perry Link
Zhao Ziyang: Ruanjinzhong de tanhua (Captive Conversations)
by Zong Fengming
Hong Kong: Kaifang, 399 pp., HK$98
In trying to make sense of their country's turbulent modern history, Chinese intellectuals sometimes resort to counterfactual speculation. How might things have been different if one or another accidental event had happened differently? For decades it was a sort of parlor game to guess how long the great writer Lu Xun, who died in 1936 possessing a keen eye for hypocrisy and a stiletto wit, and whom Mao Zedong praised in 1942 as 'the bravest, most correct national hero,' could have survived in Maoland had he lived beyond 1949. Eight years, most people said. If he had somehow managed to avoid prison until 1957, the Anti-Rightist Campaign of that year surely would have got him.[1] Harder to fathom is a question like what would have happened in China if Mao Yichang and Wen Qimei, parents of Mao Zedong, had lived apart in the spring of 1893, when Mao was conceived.
Review, 4752 words
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