Volume 40, Number 6 · March 25, 1993
The Party's Secrets
By Jonathan Mirsky
Time for Telling Truth Is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu
by Vera Schwarcz
Yale University Press, 256 pp., $30.00
A Chinese Odyssey: The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident
by Anne F. Thurston
Scribner's, 440 pp., $24.95
Chinese Village, Socialist State
by Edward Friedman, by Paul G. Pickowicz, by Mark Selden, with Kay Ann Johnson
Yale University Press, 336 pp., $35.00
Not long after Mao Zedong died in 1976, one of the editors of the Party's People's Daily said. 'Lies in newspapers are like rat droppings in clear soup: disgusting and obvious.' That may have been true of the Party's newspapers, which Chinese are skilled at reading, but the history of the Party itself is a rat's nest of often deliberate deception, which the editors of the excellent multivolume Cambridge History of China, or solitary specialists like the late Lazlo Ladany, have tried to unravel. How did the Party, for instance, and Mao in particular, get the support of its own members and the public? How many millions died in the famine of 1959–1961? Who sided with whom during the main Party struggles—during the Long March for example or, more than sixty years later, just before the Tiananmen killings? Why are we only learning now that as many as 20 million Chinese are being held in the Chinese version of the Gulag Archipelago, of whom perhaps eight million have served their sentences and are still condemned to forced labor?[1]
Review, 4920 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. |