Volume 39, Number 17 · October 22, 1992
The Other China
By Jonathan D. Spence
A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947
by Lai Tse-han, by Ramon H. Myers, by Wei Wou
Stanford University Press, 273 pp., $32.50
A Farewell: A Collection of Short Stories
by Bo Yang, translated by Robert Reynolds
Joint Publishing Company (Hong Kong), 139 pp., HK$42.00
The Great Transition: Political and Social Change in the Republic of China
by Hung-mao Tien
Hoover Institution Press, 324 pp., $22.95 (paper)
Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization
by Robert Wade
Princeton University Press, 438 pp., $65.00; $18.95 (paper)
The Protestant Community on Modern Taiwan: Mission, Seminary, and Church
by Murray A. Rubinstein
M.E. Sharpe/An East Gate Book, 199 pp., $39.95
Taiwan: Beyond the Economic Miracle
edited by Denis Fred Simon, edited by Michael Y.M. Kau
M.E. Sharpe/An East Gate Book, 400 pp., $49.95
On the same late fall day in 1991, two stories about China appeared in the Western press. One announced that thirty-five drug dealers had just been executed in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, probably by a single police bullet fired into the back of each man's neck. Before their execution, the thirty-five had been paraded and 'tried' in front of 40,000 people. A blurred photograph showed the defendants, arms tied behind their backs, each held by two helmeted policemen, in front of the enormous crowd. As their sentences were announced, a metric ton of refined heroin and four metric tons of opium, allegedly seized from the thirty-five dealers, were burned to ashes in sixty enormous cauldrons. Similar rallies and trials were said to have taken place in fifteen other southwestern Chinese cities, though the number of those executed or participating was not announced. The mass trials took place in a country where the annual per capita income was approximately $350, according to the World Bank.
Review, 6200 words
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