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. In 1968 her mother opened the door to a police officer who told her, ‘Your daughter has been suppressed. Pay the five-’fen bullet fee.’
What had changed Lin Zhao from a Maoist killer to an enemy of the Great Helmsman? One of Philip Pan’s subjects in this indispensable book — the most comprehensive and saddest study of China right up to the Olympics that I have read for years — set out, at some risk to himself, to find out.
Many China specialists have sounded the depths of official Chinese corruption, peasant misery, suppression of dissidence and mass persecution. They have shown what may be China’s greatest obstacle to becoming a modern country in the best sense: its obscuring and re-writing of history, notably anything relating to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, and the Tiananmen killings in June 1989.
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