Volume 20, Number 6 · April 19, 1973
Up Against the Wall at Tsinghua U.
By Ross Terrill
Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University
by William Hinton
Monthly Review, 288 pp., $3.45 (paper)
Turning Point in China: An Essay on the Cultural Revolution
by William Hinton
Monthly Review, 112 pp., $1.75 (paper)
Some Chinese refer to their lives before and after the Cultural Revolution as if that storm of the Sixties were a religious conversion. Like John Bunyan writing with enthusiastic horror of his unregenerate days, the cadre or craftsman today says he was chief of sinners before 1966, then as grace abounded in the form of the cultural revolutionary line he suddenly saw previously unrecognized differences between dark and light. Recent visitors to China who knew the country only before 1949, as well as those in China for the first time, have naturally been swayed by such testimony. Yet, as I recall from a visit in 1964, China was hardly a cesspool of capitalistic tendencies before the Cultural Revolution.
Review, 3225 words
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