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Down and Out in Mao's China
| Article
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12607 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1987 |
2,761 Words |
| Author
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Edward Friedman
Edward Friedman is professor of political science at the
University of Wisconsin in Madison |
Anne Thurston has produced a painfully eloquent portrait of the inhuman tragedy of Mao Zedong's China known as the Cultural Revolution. Her book, Enemies of the People, compels one to compare the enormous suffering of China's people to other man-made catastrophes. One begins to wonder whether academic programs of comparative studies could not usefully add "comparative inhumanities" to their agenda. It is not at all obvious how to comprehend this Chinese "cultural revolution" which could have had a million victims. The mind boggles when confronted with such an enormity.
Thurston tries to understand China's state-induced pillage, torture, and murder as an "extreme situation" in which the victims experience a loss of those things that give meaning to life. She compares Mao's imposition of inhumanity to Hitler's Nazism and to the bombing of Hiroshima. There is much to be garnered from Thurston's attention to the common plight of surviving victims. She compels us to confront the survivors' endless fear that the nightmare has not truly ended, that it may yet return. "Never again" is the common cry of mournful grief and idealistic commitment of native American Indians whose peoples were slaughtered by European colonialists, of Jewish survivors of the holocaust struggling to build anew in Israel, and of China's Cultural Revolution victims.
Yet we should also heed the claim of each victim that his or her plight and pain are unique. Thurston has the insight and subtlety to make the suffering of each individual real and poignant in a way that preserves and enhances the dignity of each victim. The reader is made to identify, squirm, and suffer with the plight of each innocent thrown to the mob.
Thurston's recounting of the tales of some fifty Chinese survivors of Mao's murderous vigilantism also successfully re-creates the frame of mind of the vigilante perpetrators of hideous crimes. She is especially brilliant and persuasive in explaining the thinking of the killers and torturers. This is no simple matter. It is a marvelous achievement.
The inhumanities imposed in war and conquest of one people by another may well account for most of the historic pattern of slaughter on our small planet. But Thurston's book focuses on a war that pits part of a nation against another part. In American terms, it would be about how China's Sheriff Mao stimulated a red youth KKK to terrorize and lynch China's blacks, alleged bourgeois elements.
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