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Cargando... The Secret Listener: An Ingenue in Mao's Court (edición 2022)por Yuan-tsung Chen (Autor)
Información de la obraThe Secret Listener: An Ingenue in Mao's Court por Yuan-tsung Chen
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. nonfiction/memoir - Chinese national describes her time spent as a government cadre/comrade, at first somewhat sheltered in the large cities of Shanghai and Beijing, through a first-hand experience of the land reform period in the rural northern country (1949-early 1950s redistribution of landowners' wealth leading to poorly managed fields and overly taxed starving peasants and a failure of the Great Leap Forward), in the Cultural Revolution (1966 and after, young people indoctrinated and enlisting as Red Guards) and subsequent purging of higher up officials with waning support for Mao, including time spent with her suddenly vulnerable philosophically Marxist husband in a northern labor camp. So much packed in here, and I am glad that this story was able to be published at last (the author is now in her 90s and living in Hong Kong). It is a rare (uncensored) look inside Maoist policy and practice, and I learned quite a bit about Chinese history and what my ancestors might have gone through. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
"A personal account of life in the orbit of Mao and Zhao En-Lai and one woman's effort to tell what it was like to be at the center of the storm. The history of China in the twentieth century is comprised of a long series of shocks: the 1911 revolution, the civil war between the communists and the nationalists, the Japanese invasion, the revolution, the various catastrophic campaigns initiated by Chairman Mao between 1949 and 1976, its great opening to the world under Deng, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Yuan-tsung Chen, who is now 90, lived through most of it, and at certain points in close proximity to the seat of communist power. Born in Shanghai in 1929, she came to know Zhou En-Lai--second only to Mao in importance--as a young girl while living in Chongqing, where Chiang Kai-Shek's government had relocated to, during the war against Japan. That connection to Zhou helped her save her husband's life in Cultural Revolution. After the communists took power, she obtained a job in one of the culture ministries. While there, she frequently engaged with the upper echelon of the party and was a first-hand witness to some of the purges that the regime regularly initiated. Eventually, the commissar she worked under was denounced in 1957, and she barely escaped being purged herself. Later, during Cultural Revolution, she and her husband were purged and sent to live in a rough, poor area. She and her husband finally moved to Hong Kong, with Zhou's special permission, in 1971. A first-hand account of what life was like in the period before the revolution and in Mao's China, The Secret Listener gives a unique perspective on the era, and Chen's vantage point provides us with a new perspective on the Maoist regime--one of the most radical political experiments in modern history and a force that genuinely changed the world."-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)951.05092History and Geography Asia China and region History 1949- (People's Republic, 20th century)Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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This is an interesting read and the parallels are certainly unavoidable. Yet I found myself mentally pencilling question marks in the margins here and there as I read. I'm no expert in Chinese history, and I'm certainly not suggesting that Chen is fabricating any of the events she describes here. (Although apparently there have been some critiques of her memoir on the grounds that so many sources from the period were destroyed that parts are unverifiable, and that Chen may have exaggerated her closeness to figures such as Zhou En-Lai.) But I did notice how, in her telling, Chen is always on the right side of history. Maybe it is possible for someone to have their moral compass point unwaveringly true north in the midst of such insanity, but I'm not sure it's a feat I could match. ( )