Volume 56, Number 3 · February 26, 2009
The China We Don't Know
By Jonathan Mirsky
Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village
by Ralph A. Thaxton Jr.
Cambridge University Press, 383 pp., $80.00; 27.99 (paper)
Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
by Leslie T. Chang
Spiegel and Grau, 420 pp., $26.00
In the late 1990s, Chinese peasants in the village of Da Fo, many of whom between 1959 and 1961 had survived the twentieth century's greatest famine, felt free enough to install shrines to Guangong, the traditional war god of resistance to oppressive rulers. Some were reading The Water Margin, an epic of peasant uprisings a thousand years ago against corrupt officials. They consulted late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) geomancy manuals that predicted a sixty-year cycle of apocalypse and rebellion. The manuals were banned by the local security officials, who understood perfectly what the Da Fo villagers, known for over fifty years as a 'headache,' had on their minds.
Review, 3967 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. |