Xu was denounced by his girlfriend and his schoolmates. In 1957, Xu was sentenced to China's gulag after he and a few classmates publicly criticised the Communist Party for its (at the time) slavish devotion to the Soviet Union, for holding "fake elections" with only one party-approved candidate, and for its harsh persecution of those who had hoped that Mao's revolution meant freedom, not repression. Xu's memoir, which was translated and edited from Chinese by the writer Erling Hoh, tells the story of an idealistic Communist Party member who falls afoul of the revolution when his expectations for a democratic China run headlong into Mao's totalitarian regime. Now we can add another masterpiece to this list: No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape From Mao's Darkest Prison, by Xu Hongci. But there are other equally moving books, such as Prisoner of Mao by Bao Ruowang, A Single Tear by Wu Ningkun and Li Yikai, and Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, who emigrated to Washington after she was released from the Chinese gulag and lived there until she died in 2009. Jung Chang's Wild Swans remains a classic. One of the best ways to gain an understanding of the type of society the Communists created in China – and its legacy today – is through the memoirs of people who survived these campaigns. Another low point was the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, when the lives of millions more were ruined by snitches who outed friends, relatives and neighbours for reading Western books, praising Western countries or, heaven forbid, watching an old Western movie. During the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which started in 1957, 600,000 people were sent to jail, many because they had been denounced by those around them. In the early 1950s, the Communists dispatched millions to labour camps and executed millions more on the basis of evidence culled from those near and dear to them. The results of these campaigns are well known. In China, the stool pigeon is the true hero of the revolution.Ī Chinese land owner and the "local tyrant" are forced to parade through a village wearing dunce caps during the early 1950s. From the founding of the People's Republic of China, people have been expected to report on their friends, relatives, teachers, classmates and co-workers, because it is they who know the most private thoughts of their loved ones. Nonetheless, these now-yearly endeavours underscore what remains a vital goal of China's government: to shore up the snitch society that has kept the Communist Party in power since its early days. It's unclear whether these campaigns will actually dig up any moles. State media across China warned of an increasingly "severe" national security situation. Authorities in Beijing offered cash rewards to citizens who reported foreign intelligence operatives and their Chinese lackeys. Educators in Jiangsu province rolled out a set of elementary school textbooks featuring games such as "Find the Spy". This year, the competition to root out foreign spooks and their Chinese co-conspirators has spread nationwide. The moral: There are spies everywhere, beware! In one of the final panels, we see Little Li sitting handcuffed before two police officers. He cozies up to Little Li and purloins Chinese state secrets. The man, David, claims to be a visiting scholar but is actually a foreign spy. The 16 panels, tantalisingly titled Dangerous Love, told the story of a comely Chinese civil servant, Little Li, who meets a Western man at a dinner party. In April of last year, to mark National Security Education Day, a series of posters went up in an alleyway near my home in Beijing.
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