The great deception continues

Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of New China by Philip Pan

In 1952 the 20-year-old Maoist fanatic, Lin Zhao, ordered that a Chinese landlord be immersed in a vat of icy water overnight. She said this filled her with ‘cruel happiness’. Later she wrote to a friend about how she had helped organise the execution of other landlords, some of the two million killed in those years. ‘Seeing them die this way, I felt proud and happy.’ Lin came from a family which in Maoist terms had a ‘bad class background’, the kind of ‘black’ family that could end up with bullets in the back of their necks, bullets for which their executioners would ask surviving family members to pay five pennies. Reading about her murderous zeal convinced me that she was terrified that her family background would at least taint and probably destroy her.

That is exactly what happened, although not for the reason Lin feared.