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

The great deception continues

Philip Pan
Simon & Schuster, 349pp, £14.99,

Jonathan Mirsky

Wednesday, 20th August 2008

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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cuffleyburgers

August 21st, 2008 2:00pm

Lovely to think this is the coming global hegemon...

Alfred T Mahan

August 21st, 2008 7:17pm

China's rise is hugely over-rated. Economically, centrally planned economies cannot compete with true market ones - the allocation of capital is too inefficient. Rising prosperity will bring demands for greater self-realisation and hence greater freedom, which the system will struggle to contain. Yes, there are lots of them - but the one-child policy from the 1980s is leaving them with a massive hangover in the form of pension liabilities - it makes what MacBroon has done to the UK look very unimportant - which will come home to roost over the next twenty years or so. Don't worry about China reaching anywhere near our standard of living - the country to watch is India, which is on its way to solving many of those issues, and talks (and writes) English to boot.

tsz san

August 26th, 2008 4:05am

What they did at the olympics to sell itself as a 'new china', an act which arbitrarily swept away from view all its social problems, human rights issues, corruption and accountability to its own history is....i would say...shameless and contemptible

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