What do you think?
Rate this book
The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
A harrowing account of a scholar’s imprisonment during China's Cultural Revolution, this monumental memoir is one of the few surviving recordings of the movement’s oppositionThe Chinese Cultural Revolution began in 1966 and led to a ten-year-long reign of Maoist terror throughout China, in which millions died or were sent to labor camps in the country or subjected to other forms of extreme discipline and humiliation. Ji Xianlin was one of them. The Cowshed is Ji’s harrowing account of his imprisonment in 1968 on the campus of Peking University and his subsequent disillusionment with the cult of Mao. As the campus spirals into a political frenzy, Ji, a professor of Eastern languages, is persecuted by lecturers and students from his own department. His home is raided, his most treasured possessions are destroyed, and Ji himself must endure hours of humiliation at brutal “struggle sessions.” He is forced to construct a cowshed (a makeshift prison for intellectuals who were labeled class enemies) in which he is then housed with other former colleagues. His eyewitness account of this excruciating experience is full of sharp irony, empathy, and remarkable insights into a central event in Chinese history.In contemporary China, the Cultural Revolution remains a delicate topic, little discussed, but if a Chinese citizen has read one book on the subject, it is likely to be Ji’s memoir. When The Cowshed was published in China in 1998, it quickly became a bestseller. The Cultural Revolution had nearly disappeared from the collective memory. Prominent intellectuals rarely spoke openly about the revolution, and books on the subject were almost nonexistent. By the time of Ji’s death in 2009, little had changed, and despite its popularity, The Cowshed remains one of the only testimonies of its kind. As Zha Jianying writes in the introduction, “The book has sold well and stayed in print. But authorities also quietly took steps to restrict public discussion of the memoir, as its subject continues to be treated as sensitive. The present English edition, skillfully translated by Chenxin Jiang, is hence a welcome, valuable addition to the small body of work in this genre. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of that period.”
216 pages, ebook
First published January 12, 2016
About the author
Ji Xianlin
165 books8 followersJi Xianlin (Chinese: 季羡林; pinyin: Jì Xiànlín; August 6, 1911 – July 11, 2009) was a Chinese Indologist, linguist, paleographer, historian, and writer who had been honored by the governments of both India and China. He was born in Qingping County, now Linqing, and died in the No. 301 Hospital, Beijing.
(from Wikipedia)
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
April 27, 2023
“多少年後，我醒悟過來，終于發現了一個宇宙真理：在公有制體系裏，每個單位都是小人的天下；正直的人總是少數，且無權勢；群衆的眼晴都是瞎的、勢利的，他們大部分情況下不會站在君子一邊。壞人是不會改好的，因為他不認為自己是壞人。”
to go over the view of hell through others' experience, their eyes will be my wisdom and power to defeat all evil
to go over the view of hell through others' experience, their eyes will be my wisdom and power to defeat all evil
October 26, 2019
"It made me feel just how cruel human beings could be to each other, but it also saved my life. If I could survive this, I decided, I had nothing more to fear."
The Chinese Cultural Revolution is perhaps the strangest and saddest instance of societal self-harm that a modern country has ever produced. Over the course of a decade, perhaps hundreds of thousands of China's most educated people were subjected to a grueling experience of state-sponsored humiliation at the hands of their fellow citizens. Oftentimes their persecutors were young cadres known as Red Guards. What happened was a mass atrocity, but not a genocide. There were no extermination camps and few if any mass executions. It was more like a form of psychological and physical brutality that had become encouraged and institutionalized by the state. Every day for years professors, intellectuals, artists and others deemed somehow bourgeoise were taken out of their homes to be jeered, spat upon and beaten by "the masses." Elderly were taken away to camps and made to work in the blazing sun, moving stacks of coal by hand and being fed gruel by abusive prison guards. All this was ordered by Mao Zedong, ostensibly in the name of reeducating society for the better and getting rid of archaic ways of thinking. In practice, it was totally unmoored from any appreciable logic or plan.
Ji Xianlin was a professor of Sanskrit who was deemed an ideological deviant during the revolution. This memoir, which he writes with angst and a mirthful humor, is his personal account of this period. It doesn't provide an overall picture of the Cultural Revolution, nor does it aim to. It is simply his experience, but, as the saying goes, one can often discern the existence of the ocean from a drop of water. Xianlin and other scholars from his university – most of them jewels of erudition and knowledge that China should have been proud to produce – were reduced to a class of people somehow less than human. There are many bizarre and moving episodes that he recounts. After being made to hold the airplane torture position by his tormentors, he starts practicing the position at home to better strengthen his legs for future torture sessions. At one point, after a horrifying public "struggle session," Xianlian makes a meticulous plan to kill himself with sleeping pills and die in front of Beijing's Old Summer Palace. These plans are aborted only after Red Guards come knocking at his door to take him away for further public humiliation. After this, he changes his mind. He decides to continue living after concluding that he had already been through the worst and that life could have nothing more unbearable in store for him.
The Cultural Revolution almost completely deracinated Chinese society. It destroyed a rich history and culture. While it was undertaken with some lofty-sounding Maoist justifications, like many other revolutions it quickly opened up into a free-for-all in which individual psychopaths were freed to indulge their worst impulses. Xianlin wrote this book many decades after the revolution had ended. As he says, he wrote it only after it had become clear that Chinese society was not planning to have any real reckoning with what had occurred during that time. Even then, the manuscript was kept hidden for six years before publishing. The book that he wrote is honest and personal. Somehow throughout all the pain, Xianlin manages to see the irony in his "Marxist-Leninist" persecution. He leaves out many names and says that he has no desire to seek revenge for what occurred. Despite all the horrors he personally went through and witnessed, he has written a book that could genuinely be filed as constructive criticism.
Xianlin is a real patriot who loves and believes in his China intensely. He didn't turn against China even after being deemed its enemy. Indeed, he became an even more committed nationalist in later years in service of what he now saw as a proud and rising nation. The harsh criticism in this book is itself deemed a service to China. It's worth remembering that Xi Jinping was also similarly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and has now risen to the head of state. As Xianlin's book shows, China is a country of many tough and formidable people who have very recently been through hardships that few Westerners alive today can appreciate. I recommend this to anyone interested in China, albeit those who are already somewhat familiar with the basic arc of its modern history.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution is perhaps the strangest and saddest instance of societal self-harm that a modern country has ever produced. Over the course of a decade, perhaps hundreds of thousands of China's most educated people were subjected to a grueling experience of state-sponsored humiliation at the hands of their fellow citizens. Oftentimes their persecutors were young cadres known as Red Guards. What happened was a mass atrocity, but not a genocide. There were no extermination camps and few if any mass executions. It was more like a form of psychological and physical brutality that had become encouraged and institutionalized by the state. Every day for years professors, intellectuals, artists and others deemed somehow bourgeoise were taken out of their homes to be jeered, spat upon and beaten by "the masses." Elderly were taken away to camps and made to work in the blazing sun, moving stacks of coal by hand and being fed gruel by abusive prison guards. All this was ordered by Mao Zedong, ostensibly in the name of reeducating society for the better and getting rid of archaic ways of thinking. In practice, it was totally unmoored from any appreciable logic or plan.
Ji Xianlin was a professor of Sanskrit who was deemed an ideological deviant during the revolution. This memoir, which he writes with angst and a mirthful humor, is his personal account of this period. It doesn't provide an overall picture of the Cultural Revolution, nor does it aim to. It is simply his experience, but, as the saying goes, one can often discern the existence of the ocean from a drop of water. Xianlin and other scholars from his university – most of them jewels of erudition and knowledge that China should have been proud to produce – were reduced to a class of people somehow less than human. There are many bizarre and moving episodes that he recounts. After being made to hold the airplane torture position by his tormentors, he starts practicing the position at home to better strengthen his legs for future torture sessions. At one point, after a horrifying public "struggle session," Xianlian makes a meticulous plan to kill himself with sleeping pills and die in front of Beijing's Old Summer Palace. These plans are aborted only after Red Guards come knocking at his door to take him away for further public humiliation. After this, he changes his mind. He decides to continue living after concluding that he had already been through the worst and that life could have nothing more unbearable in store for him.
The Cultural Revolution almost completely deracinated Chinese society. It destroyed a rich history and culture. While it was undertaken with some lofty-sounding Maoist justifications, like many other revolutions it quickly opened up into a free-for-all in which individual psychopaths were freed to indulge their worst impulses. Xianlin wrote this book many decades after the revolution had ended. As he says, he wrote it only after it had become clear that Chinese society was not planning to have any real reckoning with what had occurred during that time. Even then, the manuscript was kept hidden for six years before publishing. The book that he wrote is honest and personal. Somehow throughout all the pain, Xianlin manages to see the irony in his "Marxist-Leninist" persecution. He leaves out many names and says that he has no desire to seek revenge for what occurred. Despite all the horrors he personally went through and witnessed, he has written a book that could genuinely be filed as constructive criticism.
Xianlin is a real patriot who loves and believes in his China intensely. He didn't turn against China even after being deemed its enemy. Indeed, he became an even more committed nationalist in later years in service of what he now saw as a proud and rising nation. The harsh criticism in this book is itself deemed a service to China. It's worth remembering that Xi Jinping was also similarly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and has now risen to the head of state. As Xianlin's book shows, China is a country of many tough and formidable people who have very recently been through hardships that few Westerners alive today can appreciate. I recommend this to anyone interested in China, albeit those who are already somewhat familiar with the basic arc of its modern history.
August 5, 2016
The sardonic tone seems to survive translation well.
November 28, 2019
A powerful eyewitness story about one of the worst periods of human history. The holocaust nobody is talking about.
June 30, 2016
As a firsthand account of the Cultural Revolution at Peking University, this book is invaluable. But Ji Xianlin is no Primo Levi; don't trust him on the broad strokes. His vision can be surprisingly narrow. For example:
"On a July or August day when the sun was at its hottest, I caught sight of the party secretary staring at the noonday sun. A guard, a biology student, was sitting nearby in the shade. [...] From ancient feudal societies built on slavery to modern capitalist societies, has anyone devised a punishment like this?
Yes, actually, they have. Often. Ji studied in Berlin during the War; he should know.
Ji is unapologetically nationalist. He continues to support the Communist Party. As a result he can describe the Cultural Revolution but not explain it. To his credit, he acknowledges this shortcoming. Unfortunately for the reader, we are left wanting more.
"If we refuse to study this problem," Ji writes in the conclusion, "we leave it to foreigners to continue to do so." Alas, he is still correct. The foreign perspective will never be as accurate as the Chinese one could be. But what can we do. "Regardless of whether their [foreigners'] work addresses the most crucial issues, honesty is better than lies." 是的。 我们继续吧。
"On a July or August day when the sun was at its hottest, I caught sight of the party secretary staring at the noonday sun. A guard, a biology student, was sitting nearby in the shade. [...] From ancient feudal societies built on slavery to modern capitalist societies, has anyone devised a punishment like this?
Yes, actually, they have. Often. Ji studied in Berlin during the War; he should know.
Ji is unapologetically nationalist. He continues to support the Communist Party. As a result he can describe the Cultural Revolution but not explain it. To his credit, he acknowledges this shortcoming. Unfortunately for the reader, we are left wanting more.
"If we refuse to study this problem," Ji writes in the conclusion, "we leave it to foreigners to continue to do so." Alas, he is still correct. The foreign perspective will never be as accurate as the Chinese one could be. But what can we do. "Regardless of whether their [foreigners'] work addresses the most crucial issues, honesty is better than lies." 是的。 我们继续吧。
September 28, 2019
Interesting testimony book, but leaves you with more questions. No «wide scope», only what the author himself has experienced. Not so enlightening if you don’t know anything about the Cultural Revolution already, a category I am close to. It confirms what little I already knew: A campaign which sets free systematic bullying, mob rule and guilt upon accusation. The rule of envy and grievance, of hysterics and mob.
I have Frank Dikötter’s book and will eventually get around to read it, that should provide context and scope for me. On the minus side of that one is that it’s very long and more demanding to read. This one is very short and easy to read. The author is also very funny some times, in a bitter way: «I had the fortune to be born in interesting times» indeed.
A disgusting chapter in the long story of the human beast.
I have Frank Dikötter’s book and will eventually get around to read it, that should provide context and scope for me. On the minus side of that one is that it’s very long and more demanding to read. This one is very short and easy to read. The author is also very funny some times, in a bitter way: «I had the fortune to be born in interesting times» indeed.
A disgusting chapter in the long story of the human beast.
Read
August 29, 2016"The memoirs and fiction about Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) that were published in the post–Mao People’s Republic (prc) disappointed Peking University Indologist Ji Xianlin (1911–2009): they lacked candor about Cultural Revolution brutality and dishonestly portrayed their authors solely as victims. After reading such works for a decade, Ji abandoned all hope that someone else would write a candid and truthful memoir and decided to do it himself." - Philip F. Williams
This book was reviewed in the September/October 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
This book was reviewed in the September/October 2016 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
September 23, 2016
A fairly straight-forward account of one man's sufferings during the GPCR
January 21, 2021
The Cowshed is a short memoir portraying Ji Xianlin's experience during the Cultural Revolution - or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to give it its full name. Ji was a professor at (then) Peking University in (now) Beijing during the chaotic period from 1966 to 1976 of "continuous revolution" propounded by Mao.
It was, in theory, a means of purging communist China of the last vestiges of bourgeois and capitalist elements but, in reality, devolved into violent, factional feuding. It is one of the peculiar features of the Cultural Revolution that the movement grew up on university campuses with much of the earlier events occurring in places such as Ji's Peking University and nearby Tsinghua University. From protests and riots there, the unrest spread across the country resulting in numerous massacres, including such grisly spectacles as the Guangxi massacre in which widespread cannibalism was reported. As elsewhere, the precise details of this event are highly complicated but in very simply terms the Guangxi events can be viewed as fighting between different factions, both of whom think their grasp of the Supreme Leader's thought is the right one. Compared to other similar periods, the Cultural Revolution was marked by disorder and infighting rather than being directed by the state (as against, for instance, the in-power Bolsheviks versus the White Russians in the Russian civil war of the 1920s, which was much more a battle of those in power rooting out those who were not).
Such is the history. That I felt the need to preface this review with a (hopefully not too inaccurate) rendering of the context tells you much about Ji's book: it can be read by the totally uninitiated but a basic knowledge of modern Chinese history will certainly make this more enjoyable. The reason for this is that this is intended for a Chinese audience, specifically younger Chinese who, according to Ji, know little about the Cultural Revolution and (crucially) have few resources to draw upon even if they do want to understand this point in their own past.
Ji's story truly begins in the middle of things, as he is sent to Nankou to be re-educated by the peasants (in the aim of training away the bourgeois elements of him and his fellow academics). I was relieved not to have to read chapter after chapter of back story - though the Appendix to the book does give a pleasantly zippy overview of the author's life which is well worth a skim. The book proper's early sections serve as a 'calm before the storm' and treats the reader to full Chinese-style writing, such as the constant procession of proverbs: as Ji leaves the village of Nankou he remarks "When the traveller looks back at the trees of where he once lodged, the place begins to look like home".
From Nankou, we hear about the escalating events on campus, with the astonishing and (as far as I'm aware) uniquely Chinese spectacle of 'struggle sessions' played out numerous times, first with Ji as tacitly complicit spectator and then as victim. These sessions involved a victim being variously paraded around campus, or stood on a stage in a lecture hall, with students and other staff shouting at them or beating them in an attempt to break them of their capitalist tendencies, to have them confess such crimes or to to serve as warning to others. Often the victim had to adopt a so-called 'stress position' such as bending over with arms spread wide (the famous airplane position), to make the experience even more physically difficult.
We hear numerous descriptions of these struggle sessions. After Ji himself began to be abused, he describes how he was targeted as a former leader of a union (a travesty that an intellectual should lead a workers' body you see). In contrast to Ji's experience at the hands of his students "the workers lived up to their reputation as men of deeds rather than words: Instead of making long speeches [as the students liked to do], they limited themselves to punching and kicking and pelting me with stones." As the author goes on in characteristically black-comedic terms, "next the Asia-Africa Institute decided it wanted a piece of the action ... now I was being attacked they wanted to demonstrate their own revolutionary fervour ... They hauled me off to a small room in the Institute ... I wasn't impressed. The slogans were half-hearted, there was no kicking or punching, and I barely held the airplane position at all ... If I were grading struggle sessions, this one would fail - I couldn't give it any more than a 3 out of 10."
It is notable that, throughout all this, Ji never loses faith with Mao, only with the movement. Thinking of the Great Helmsman is even a source of strength: "To keep myself going [during struggle sessions] I sometimes repeated a Mao saying to myself: 'Make up your mind to fight without counting the costs, overcome all obstacles, and strive for victory!' ... This generally worked. As I persevered, the slogans and speeches began to sound faint and faraway, like thunder on distant hilltops".
In the same chapter we hear how Ji undertakes an exercise regime - he practices the airplane position - to be able to survive the struggle sessions. While mastering this torture position, he notes that he kept a lookout for Red Guards (revolutionaries). As so often Ji justifies this in wonderfully bitter-sarcastic tones: I kept an eye out "because I have always been an impatient person and consequently very punctual. Although I couldn't guarantee that a struggle sessions would finish on time, I didn't want one delayed on my account". In a similar manner, he later describes times when he was not forced to work rather than to adopt the airplane position: "working was pleasant in comparison. I was an incorrigible bourgeois capitalist, constantly finding something to enjoy [gruelling manual labour]".
Through all this section, it is difficult to avoid putting yourself into the Peking University of the late 1960s. The notion of begin at university and physically and verbally abusing staff is so totally bizarre that the book is worth reading for this alone, as an illustration of the evil that can be induced in groups of 'ordinary' people; these weren't soldiers or government apparatchiks but students.
Yet this is nothing compared to the astonishing cowshed after which the book is named. This was a rickety old building in which those most serious enemies of the revolution were incarcerated. Think of it as a concentration camp on campus. Ji was held there for seven months after numerous struggle sessions against him and being forced to carry out manual labour tasks in the ceaseless process of re-education of the capitalist intellectuals. Ostensibly held because he was found with a photograph of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-Shek, his travails were caused, he believed, by his taking issue with the leader of one of the university factions (New Beida) - a woman he disparagingly refers to throughout as the Empress Dowager (real name: Nie Yuanzi, a dictatorial leader and erstwhile philosophy lecturer).
The very concept of having a prison containing academics on university grounds is so utterly unthinkable as to be almost unbelievable. Having recently read Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History (on Russian prison camps) and Art Spiegelman's Maus (on Auschwitz), Ji's camp does not plumb quite the depths of depravity and abuse as those other 20th century examples (if one can be relative about such things). This book won't astonish you quite to the degree of those others with regards human cruelty, but what shocked me on every page is the setting and the perpetrators: not the barren steppe of Kazakhstan's Karlag but the serene faculty buildings of Peking University; not the Commandant of Auschwitz but a hapless student guard watching Ji's every move. The incongruity of savage beatings with bike chains (covered in rubber to prevent lasting damage) and demeaning labour in the bucolic setting of suburban Beijing overseen by the academics' former students is shocking to say the least.
After his incarceration, and as a result of incorrigible machinations behind the scenes, Ji was deemed un-capitalist enough to be released from the cowshed, but only to be half liberated by being forced to work as security guard in a different block. From here he eventually returned to his former scholarly life. Perhaps the greatest oddity of this whole episode in human history, brilliantly shown by Ji's experience, is that victims and perpetrators ended up mingling after the fact. Ji would have seen and worked with those who had seemingly relished imprisoning and abusing him; there was never a public reckoning or reconciliation that could have left those who suffered feeling like justice was done. As Ji points out towards the end, there is simmering resentment in his generation that younger Chinese simply cannot understand. From my Western vantage point I cannot comprehend the fortitude shown by such people to live amongst their former tormenters where the state has no interest in prosecuting their crimes.
Which, in the end, is truly what makes the book stand out. A book about the cultural revolution published in English for a Western audience that highlights its atrocities is nothing new; but one allowed to be published in mainland China and expressly for this audience is truly a rarity and makes this book worth reading in and of itself. It does, of course, mean the author has no intention of explaining things that may be obvious to his audience which is why a working knowledge of Chinese history is very useful, but it does mean that the book sits in a totally different category to most other books I've read on China.
It is unfortunate, given its clear importance, that the book is, to be blunt, not well written. Perhaps it is a 'lost in translation' issue but my hunch is that the author wasn't a great stylist. Whatever it is, the book is not well written as received in English. When describing the two Peking University factions' adherence to Mao's wife we hear how "both revered Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, and claimed to be her most loyal followers. New Beida attempted to intimidate its opponents by invoking her name, and Jinggangshan [the other faction] also flew the flag of devotion to Jiang Qing." Such clunky writing is commonplace. We also often get told the same thing numerous times, for example we are repeatedly told the aphoristic saying "The academic can be killed, but not humiliated" as if for the first time, even on the fourth.
Were this a novel, I would likely have focussed on these literary shortcomings. As it is it merely drags the review score down a couple of stars because I soon realised this work should not be viewed as a literary but as a historical piece. It is truly an amazing document of that time, the sort of thing that should be studied by historians (or psychologists) and not literature academics. Once you've mentally adjusted to this way of thinking - and shaking off my personal issue that I've read a lot of exceptionally well-written books recently - Ji's account of Peking University during the Cultural Revolution is an absolute must read about one of the twentieth century's most shocking yet least understood episodes.
It was, in theory, a means of purging communist China of the last vestiges of bourgeois and capitalist elements but, in reality, devolved into violent, factional feuding. It is one of the peculiar features of the Cultural Revolution that the movement grew up on university campuses with much of the earlier events occurring in places such as Ji's Peking University and nearby Tsinghua University. From protests and riots there, the unrest spread across the country resulting in numerous massacres, including such grisly spectacles as the Guangxi massacre in which widespread cannibalism was reported. As elsewhere, the precise details of this event are highly complicated but in very simply terms the Guangxi events can be viewed as fighting between different factions, both of whom think their grasp of the Supreme Leader's thought is the right one. Compared to other similar periods, the Cultural Revolution was marked by disorder and infighting rather than being directed by the state (as against, for instance, the in-power Bolsheviks versus the White Russians in the Russian civil war of the 1920s, which was much more a battle of those in power rooting out those who were not).
Such is the history. That I felt the need to preface this review with a (hopefully not too inaccurate) rendering of the context tells you much about Ji's book: it can be read by the totally uninitiated but a basic knowledge of modern Chinese history will certainly make this more enjoyable. The reason for this is that this is intended for a Chinese audience, specifically younger Chinese who, according to Ji, know little about the Cultural Revolution and (crucially) have few resources to draw upon even if they do want to understand this point in their own past.
Ji's story truly begins in the middle of things, as he is sent to Nankou to be re-educated by the peasants (in the aim of training away the bourgeois elements of him and his fellow academics). I was relieved not to have to read chapter after chapter of back story - though the Appendix to the book does give a pleasantly zippy overview of the author's life which is well worth a skim. The book proper's early sections serve as a 'calm before the storm' and treats the reader to full Chinese-style writing, such as the constant procession of proverbs: as Ji leaves the village of Nankou he remarks "When the traveller looks back at the trees of where he once lodged, the place begins to look like home".
From Nankou, we hear about the escalating events on campus, with the astonishing and (as far as I'm aware) uniquely Chinese spectacle of 'struggle sessions' played out numerous times, first with Ji as tacitly complicit spectator and then as victim. These sessions involved a victim being variously paraded around campus, or stood on a stage in a lecture hall, with students and other staff shouting at them or beating them in an attempt to break them of their capitalist tendencies, to have them confess such crimes or to to serve as warning to others. Often the victim had to adopt a so-called 'stress position' such as bending over with arms spread wide (the famous airplane position), to make the experience even more physically difficult.
We hear numerous descriptions of these struggle sessions. After Ji himself began to be abused, he describes how he was targeted as a former leader of a union (a travesty that an intellectual should lead a workers' body you see). In contrast to Ji's experience at the hands of his students "the workers lived up to their reputation as men of deeds rather than words: Instead of making long speeches [as the students liked to do], they limited themselves to punching and kicking and pelting me with stones." As the author goes on in characteristically black-comedic terms, "next the Asia-Africa Institute decided it wanted a piece of the action ... now I was being attacked they wanted to demonstrate their own revolutionary fervour ... They hauled me off to a small room in the Institute ... I wasn't impressed. The slogans were half-hearted, there was no kicking or punching, and I barely held the airplane position at all ... If I were grading struggle sessions, this one would fail - I couldn't give it any more than a 3 out of 10."
It is notable that, throughout all this, Ji never loses faith with Mao, only with the movement. Thinking of the Great Helmsman is even a source of strength: "To keep myself going [during struggle sessions] I sometimes repeated a Mao saying to myself: 'Make up your mind to fight without counting the costs, overcome all obstacles, and strive for victory!' ... This generally worked. As I persevered, the slogans and speeches began to sound faint and faraway, like thunder on distant hilltops".
In the same chapter we hear how Ji undertakes an exercise regime - he practices the airplane position - to be able to survive the struggle sessions. While mastering this torture position, he notes that he kept a lookout for Red Guards (revolutionaries). As so often Ji justifies this in wonderfully bitter-sarcastic tones: I kept an eye out "because I have always been an impatient person and consequently very punctual. Although I couldn't guarantee that a struggle sessions would finish on time, I didn't want one delayed on my account". In a similar manner, he later describes times when he was not forced to work rather than to adopt the airplane position: "working was pleasant in comparison. I was an incorrigible bourgeois capitalist, constantly finding something to enjoy [gruelling manual labour]".
Through all this section, it is difficult to avoid putting yourself into the Peking University of the late 1960s. The notion of begin at university and physically and verbally abusing staff is so totally bizarre that the book is worth reading for this alone, as an illustration of the evil that can be induced in groups of 'ordinary' people; these weren't soldiers or government apparatchiks but students.
Yet this is nothing compared to the astonishing cowshed after which the book is named. This was a rickety old building in which those most serious enemies of the revolution were incarcerated. Think of it as a concentration camp on campus. Ji was held there for seven months after numerous struggle sessions against him and being forced to carry out manual labour tasks in the ceaseless process of re-education of the capitalist intellectuals. Ostensibly held because he was found with a photograph of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-Shek, his travails were caused, he believed, by his taking issue with the leader of one of the university factions (New Beida) - a woman he disparagingly refers to throughout as the Empress Dowager (real name: Nie Yuanzi, a dictatorial leader and erstwhile philosophy lecturer).
The very concept of having a prison containing academics on university grounds is so utterly unthinkable as to be almost unbelievable. Having recently read Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History (on Russian prison camps) and Art Spiegelman's Maus (on Auschwitz), Ji's camp does not plumb quite the depths of depravity and abuse as those other 20th century examples (if one can be relative about such things). This book won't astonish you quite to the degree of those others with regards human cruelty, but what shocked me on every page is the setting and the perpetrators: not the barren steppe of Kazakhstan's Karlag but the serene faculty buildings of Peking University; not the Commandant of Auschwitz but a hapless student guard watching Ji's every move. The incongruity of savage beatings with bike chains (covered in rubber to prevent lasting damage) and demeaning labour in the bucolic setting of suburban Beijing overseen by the academics' former students is shocking to say the least.
After his incarceration, and as a result of incorrigible machinations behind the scenes, Ji was deemed un-capitalist enough to be released from the cowshed, but only to be half liberated by being forced to work as security guard in a different block. From here he eventually returned to his former scholarly life. Perhaps the greatest oddity of this whole episode in human history, brilliantly shown by Ji's experience, is that victims and perpetrators ended up mingling after the fact. Ji would have seen and worked with those who had seemingly relished imprisoning and abusing him; there was never a public reckoning or reconciliation that could have left those who suffered feeling like justice was done. As Ji points out towards the end, there is simmering resentment in his generation that younger Chinese simply cannot understand. From my Western vantage point I cannot comprehend the fortitude shown by such people to live amongst their former tormenters where the state has no interest in prosecuting their crimes.
Which, in the end, is truly what makes the book stand out. A book about the cultural revolution published in English for a Western audience that highlights its atrocities is nothing new; but one allowed to be published in mainland China and expressly for this audience is truly a rarity and makes this book worth reading in and of itself. It does, of course, mean the author has no intention of explaining things that may be obvious to his audience which is why a working knowledge of Chinese history is very useful, but it does mean that the book sits in a totally different category to most other books I've read on China.
It is unfortunate, given its clear importance, that the book is, to be blunt, not well written. Perhaps it is a 'lost in translation' issue but my hunch is that the author wasn't a great stylist. Whatever it is, the book is not well written as received in English. When describing the two Peking University factions' adherence to Mao's wife we hear how "both revered Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, and claimed to be her most loyal followers. New Beida attempted to intimidate its opponents by invoking her name, and Jinggangshan [the other faction] also flew the flag of devotion to Jiang Qing." Such clunky writing is commonplace. We also often get told the same thing numerous times, for example we are repeatedly told the aphoristic saying "The academic can be killed, but not humiliated" as if for the first time, even on the fourth.
Were this a novel, I would likely have focussed on these literary shortcomings. As it is it merely drags the review score down a couple of stars because I soon realised this work should not be viewed as a literary but as a historical piece. It is truly an amazing document of that time, the sort of thing that should be studied by historians (or psychologists) and not literature academics. Once you've mentally adjusted to this way of thinking - and shaking off my personal issue that I've read a lot of exceptionally well-written books recently - Ji's account of Peking University during the Cultural Revolution is an absolute must read about one of the twentieth century's most shocking yet least understood episodes.
September 20, 2022
My family lived through and was persecuted during the cultural revolution, so the stories here aren’t completely new to me.
I appreciate the author’s humour in recounting his traumatic experience - humour really is a good psychological defence in dire situations.
One thing that irks me in his account is the obvious sexism and slut shaming - calling his female colleague a “broken shoe”. Every person oppressed also oppresses others and we must all attend to our privileges from an intersectional place.
It makes me really sad that even when he was persecuted and thrown to the bottom of the rung in terms of class, when he no longer felt he was classified as human, he still had enough entitlement to ridicule and put women down - it just shows how objectified and persecuted women were, and still are today, in Chinese culture.
I appreciate the author’s humour in recounting his traumatic experience - humour really is a good psychological defence in dire situations.
One thing that irks me in his account is the obvious sexism and slut shaming - calling his female colleague a “broken shoe”. Every person oppressed also oppresses others and we must all attend to our privileges from an intersectional place.
It makes me really sad that even when he was persecuted and thrown to the bottom of the rung in terms of class, when he no longer felt he was classified as human, he still had enough entitlement to ridicule and put women down - it just shows how objectified and persecuted women were, and still are today, in Chinese culture.
March 11, 2024
he writes well. & i think he’s right, that this is an important story worth telling and how it is crucial to understand what the cultural revolution was like. he writes rather matter-of-factly, and is rather sarcastic / has some undertones of dark humor i guess — but it’s probably his only way to cope.
September 26, 2023
2.5 stars
February 15, 2017
Kind of like the Gulag Archipelago but inferior in every category desu.
March 6, 2017
Here is a very rare book - a Chinese intellectual who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution who has written about it as well as his evolving thoughts on it. It is rare because hardly any Chinese persecuted has written about it, and what is even more rare is that no Red Guard persecutor has written about his or her experiences. (Books on the Cultural Revolution have tended to be written by foreigners.)
Through this book, one gets an appreciation too of how forward thinking the main universities in Beijing were, the author himself specializing in Sanskrit for example, and one can't help wondering how much more China would have progressed without the 10-year Cultural Revolution.
Through this book, one gets an appreciation too of how forward thinking the main universities in Beijing were, the author himself specializing in Sanskrit for example, and one can't help wondering how much more China would have progressed without the 10-year Cultural Revolution.
April 2, 2023
Unfortunately this memoir doesn’t offer much incite into what the cultural revolution was, but what it did to the author, which is valuable though without much knowledge of the context it’s effect is difficult to surmise. Similarly the authors style and wit is great, but also makes the narrative a bit contradictory at times, which again lessons the impact of his recollection. The best part of the book was one of the appendix where the author gives an overview of his life and offers interesting commentary on the intersections of history.
July 10, 2017
I had read about the cultural revolution in China and thought I had a pretty good idea about what went on during that time. Wrong. This book was a real eye opener about just what it was like, how it happened, and how they dealt with it. It makes you wonder how they managed to get over it and head towards the country that they are today. It also gives some insight into how people get swept up by events and how powerless they can be to change the prevailing culture.
November 16, 2020
There is nothing wrong with the book; I probably was not the best audience for it. I read it in hopes of better understanding the Cultural Revolution for teaching the memoir Red Scarf Girl to middle schoolers, and I did not come away with much to help me in that respect, although I did gain a new understanding of the brutality of those who were impacted by it.
April 10, 2016
It's not great literature. In fact: it isn't literature. But I raises a number of questions on human behavior and on the current Chinese system that has passed over this period without ever passing judgment on this mass hysteria and the responsibilities for it
April 15, 2021
Even as a translation I really believe Xianlin's tone carries itself through his work. It's this warm, grandfatherly tone that allows us as readers to read his experiences of horrific treatment and persecution with a calm enough demeanor to fully absorb the situation he was in and hopefully, in his words, learn something from the disaster that was the cultural revolution. Even though this tone might be just a coping mechanism, as Jianying hypothesizes in her introduction to this work, to deal with both the humiliation and resentment brought about by the torture he endured, it leads the reader into entering an extremely empathetic state of mind. One thinks, "How can anyone do this to a nice old man?", "How could you beat up a grandfather, starve him, rob him, threaten and bully him, all for the sake of misplaced patriotism?" and finally, "At what point does forcing a person to stare into the sun further the interests of your people?" All these thoughts swirl in the mind of the reader as Xianlin describes the ever increasing and ingenious methods of torture he and other intellectuals of his time endured, all for some unknown and vague purpose, and you get a sense of the terrific waste the government wrought about, in both human lives and intellectual advancement, by supporting the cultural revolution.
Even though Xianlin is the victim of all this, he still manages to write with a sense of good humor and even self-criticism. He truly was a believer in communist ideals, and only until he found himself on the wrong side of the revolutionary government did he realize that the whole thing was a sham. How could he whole heartedly support the government when it was allowing an environment of chaos and violence to subsist on the grounds of one of the foremost university campuses in China? After having lived in Germany during the rise of Hitler's power up until the end of world war two, he chastises himself for having fallen into the cult of Mao, when he had already seen first hand the terrible consequences blind devotion to a powerful leader can bring. He talks about the pull of communism, the real belief that China would remake itself into a a sort of utopia after the corruption of the previous government and war with Japan, he felt real guilt at not being in China when many of his countrymen were fighting for their freedom, and then, when the communist party fell into factionalism within his university campus, guilt over joining the persecutors and denouncing his fellow colleagues. There was really no right answer for Xianlin, it seemed at the height of the cultural revolution politics was everything, everyone needed to keep abreast of the right thing to say and who you needed to flatter, and even then, as an intellectual his days were numbered. He freely admits he had no talent in playing politics and was thankful to escape the majority of the cultural revolution unscathed and glad to have experienced a survivable portion of it to carry the memory for future generations.
All in all, this was a really excellent read, firstly for being a firsthand account of how Redgaurd factions would rise in power and maintain their control over the people by enforcing communist ideals, and secondly, for Xianlin's account of having survived the cultural revolution as a university professor. His attitude towards his own persecution is something to behold and his optimism for the future as well as his sense of consideration (maybe something like forgiveness) is something that I think many readers can take home with them after finishing this novel. I'd definitely recommend other readers to check this work out.
Some quotes I enjoyed:
"Of course we were a little nostalgic to be leaving Nankou, which had been our home for the past seven or eight months. I was reminded of a poem: "When the traveler looks back at the trees of where he once lodged, the place begins to look like home." (Page 11)"
"By the time I was old enough to remember anything, we were destitute....My mother never ate a single bite. She simply sat watching me eat, her eyes growing wet. At the time I was naturally unable to understand her feelings. I decided then that when I grew up, I would buy her wheat congee. Yet in the poet's words, "Just as the tree longs for stillness when the wind blows, the child longs to take care of his parents when they are no longer there." My mother passed away before I ever had the chance to treat her to a meal of wheat congee, a loss that I grieve and regret to this day. (Page 154)"
"I was too young to understand how my mother must have felt. Many years later, I was told that she had apparently said, "If only I'd known he would never come back, I would have died rather than let him leave!" I never heard her say those words, but they have echoed in my mind over the decades. As the poet Meng Jiao wrote, comparing a child's debt to his parents to a plant's debt to the sun, "How can a blade of grass repay the warmth of the spring?" I left home when I was six. (Page 154)"
Even though Xianlin is the victim of all this, he still manages to write with a sense of good humor and even self-criticism. He truly was a believer in communist ideals, and only until he found himself on the wrong side of the revolutionary government did he realize that the whole thing was a sham. How could he whole heartedly support the government when it was allowing an environment of chaos and violence to subsist on the grounds of one of the foremost university campuses in China? After having lived in Germany during the rise of Hitler's power up until the end of world war two, he chastises himself for having fallen into the cult of Mao, when he had already seen first hand the terrible consequences blind devotion to a powerful leader can bring. He talks about the pull of communism, the real belief that China would remake itself into a a sort of utopia after the corruption of the previous government and war with Japan, he felt real guilt at not being in China when many of his countrymen were fighting for their freedom, and then, when the communist party fell into factionalism within his university campus, guilt over joining the persecutors and denouncing his fellow colleagues. There was really no right answer for Xianlin, it seemed at the height of the cultural revolution politics was everything, everyone needed to keep abreast of the right thing to say and who you needed to flatter, and even then, as an intellectual his days were numbered. He freely admits he had no talent in playing politics and was thankful to escape the majority of the cultural revolution unscathed and glad to have experienced a survivable portion of it to carry the memory for future generations.
All in all, this was a really excellent read, firstly for being a firsthand account of how Redgaurd factions would rise in power and maintain their control over the people by enforcing communist ideals, and secondly, for Xianlin's account of having survived the cultural revolution as a university professor. His attitude towards his own persecution is something to behold and his optimism for the future as well as his sense of consideration (maybe something like forgiveness) is something that I think many readers can take home with them after finishing this novel. I'd definitely recommend other readers to check this work out.
Some quotes I enjoyed:
"Of course we were a little nostalgic to be leaving Nankou, which had been our home for the past seven or eight months. I was reminded of a poem: "When the traveler looks back at the trees of where he once lodged, the place begins to look like home." (Page 11)"
"By the time I was old enough to remember anything, we were destitute....My mother never ate a single bite. She simply sat watching me eat, her eyes growing wet. At the time I was naturally unable to understand her feelings. I decided then that when I grew up, I would buy her wheat congee. Yet in the poet's words, "Just as the tree longs for stillness when the wind blows, the child longs to take care of his parents when they are no longer there." My mother passed away before I ever had the chance to treat her to a meal of wheat congee, a loss that I grieve and regret to this day. (Page 154)"
"I was too young to understand how my mother must have felt. Many years later, I was told that she had apparently said, "If only I'd known he would never come back, I would have died rather than let him leave!" I never heard her say those words, but they have echoed in my mind over the decades. As the poet Meng Jiao wrote, comparing a child's debt to his parents to a plant's debt to the sun, "How can a blade of grass repay the warmth of the spring?" I left home when I was six. (Page 154)"
June 12, 2022
Forthright account of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76) by a professor who experienced the insanity. For a decade, groups of Red Guards (hyper partisan, self righteous college students, with workers and others) engaged in a "continuous revolution" against anyone allegedly not true to Communist values. Confusingly, groups had gang style fights against each other, all claiming to be true followers of Mao and communism. Unsurprisingly though, people were often persecuted for personal vendettas, for the sake of power, or out of our sadism. This led to widespread violence, murders, public chaos, and public humiliations in so called "struggle sessions." This book focuses primarily on one professor's experience with these public humiliations, imprisonment, and physical violence.
Given today's censor crazy regime, it's amazing to me the CCP allowed a book like this to be published, but the early 90s were a different time. Even then, the author, Ji Xianlin, is still very careful to criticize the Cultural Revolution only, not Mao or the CCP that promoted a decade of lawless internal "revolution."
The Cultural Revolution isn't spoken of too often these days, but it's one of those historical events that so many lessons can be drawn from. Like the chaos that ensues when political positions are pulled ever further to the extremes. It's hard not to draw connections to the French Revolutions reign of terror. The dangers of one party rule are evident, because there is no counterbalancing force or opinions to point out errors. Free speech rights, of course, would have been necessary for the latter to occur. Those rights were not and are not something the CCP has ever tolerated though.
It's hard not to also see the dangers of idealism disconnected from reality. That the Cultural Revolution was embraced by so many college students isn't shocking in this regard. I'm my experience, as a group students tend towards idealism, making them ripe for extreme positions. While nothing on the level of the Cultural Revolution, the protests American students have waged against universities, free speech rights, and in support of far left positions, has a concerning similarity.
This book is worth reading for many reasons, not just the lessons it draws. The author sincerely desired that as a country, China would reflect on the chaos and insanity of the Cultural Revolution, so that something like it would never occur again. Whether that introspection occurred in the past three decades, I have no idea. That's not just a lesson for China though. Any country though should be willing to review its past sins, take an honest look at the causes, and take steps to ensure history doesn't repeat itself. Such review didn't have to be all self righteous chest beating and insistence on extreme solutions. Education and an honest look at what happened, that it was wrong, and that it should not occur again, can help a country move forward.
If you read the book, this isn't a traditional American style memoir. The author focuses on the cultural revolution and starts the story there. If you want his background first, there's an essay on the appendix you could start with. The author also wrote for the Chinese who lived through these events, so a certain familiarity with China's history in the early to mid 20th century is helpful. It's not required to get the overall point though.
Given today's censor crazy regime, it's amazing to me the CCP allowed a book like this to be published, but the early 90s were a different time. Even then, the author, Ji Xianlin, is still very careful to criticize the Cultural Revolution only, not Mao or the CCP that promoted a decade of lawless internal "revolution."
The Cultural Revolution isn't spoken of too often these days, but it's one of those historical events that so many lessons can be drawn from. Like the chaos that ensues when political positions are pulled ever further to the extremes. It's hard not to draw connections to the French Revolutions reign of terror. The dangers of one party rule are evident, because there is no counterbalancing force or opinions to point out errors. Free speech rights, of course, would have been necessary for the latter to occur. Those rights were not and are not something the CCP has ever tolerated though.
It's hard not to also see the dangers of idealism disconnected from reality. That the Cultural Revolution was embraced by so many college students isn't shocking in this regard. I'm my experience, as a group students tend towards idealism, making them ripe for extreme positions. While nothing on the level of the Cultural Revolution, the protests American students have waged against universities, free speech rights, and in support of far left positions, has a concerning similarity.
This book is worth reading for many reasons, not just the lessons it draws. The author sincerely desired that as a country, China would reflect on the chaos and insanity of the Cultural Revolution, so that something like it would never occur again. Whether that introspection occurred in the past three decades, I have no idea. That's not just a lesson for China though. Any country though should be willing to review its past sins, take an honest look at the causes, and take steps to ensure history doesn't repeat itself. Such review didn't have to be all self righteous chest beating and insistence on extreme solutions. Education and an honest look at what happened, that it was wrong, and that it should not occur again, can help a country move forward.
If you read the book, this isn't a traditional American style memoir. The author focuses on the cultural revolution and starts the story there. If you want his background first, there's an essay on the appendix you could start with. The author also wrote for the Chinese who lived through these events, so a certain familiarity with China's history in the early to mid 20th century is helpful. It's not required to get the overall point though.
September 3, 2022
A miserable attempt to continue with my “China project.” (The war didn’t change my reading overall but changed my priorities in book choices, for sure, so I just try to keep up as best as I can.)
The attempt was miserable because this book turned out to be one of the most uninformative and confusing accounts of the Cultural Revolution. I thought that personal memoirs of a man who was one of the most prominent victims during the Cultural Revolution would help to understand this important phenomenon much better than more composite, “analytical” materials. Especially considering that this person was not an ordinary man but a highly intelligent scientist, educator, and a “public intellectual.”
Ugh, no. I don’t even understand what exactly is wrong here, the personality of the author or the very subject of the Cultural Revolution (impenetrable?), but this story looks like a huge dark cluttered warehouse where you try to see something with a very weak and dull flashlight — you can see no more than several centimeters of the space near you at a time, and nothing more, and however long you move your flashlight to and fro, you cannot even form a crudest impression regarding what this place is about, how big it is, and where you are in it.
More than anything, the feelings and behavior of Xianlin Ji during the Cultural Revolution remind you of Kafka’s “The Trial” and “The Castle”: nobody understands what’s going on but somehow everybody already knows their place in this phantasmagoria and tries to be the best performer of this absurd role, negotiates about their “trial” and survival in it while no accusations were even presented and there are obviously no laws and rules there.
Yeah, the author admits this himself: “Although our motto was “Chaos confuses the enemy,” our chaos had confused no one but ourselves.” However, even this one little sentence is even more confusing — what “enemy”? why did this chaotic shit even start? what exactly people were fighting for?
The most confusing thing in everything he described was the obvious incomprehensive gap between anything that was declared (reforms, “revolutionary” intentions, transformation of society to a better one) and all those senseless tortures that regular people (not the police! not soldiers! just your fellow students, teachers, neighbors) committed over other people — and nobody even dares to think that all this is WRONG and outright CRIMINAL. No, everybody, including the author of the book, does not even bother to question the immorality and macabre atrocity of everything people did to each other. They just accepted all this as some default status and tried to survive under the circumstances. All this is completely bewildering, and no observations, explanations, or reflections of the author help even to understand why this was happening to the society — he was just part of this society and accepted everything as “their new normal.”
Xianlin Ji had a long and quite interesting life: he was born in 1911 and was a witness to all the major events in China’s history of the 20th century when he was already an adult and well-educated person. Moreover, he even studied in Germany in the 1930s and returned to China only after the Second World War. During the Cultural Revolution he, as a professor at Peking University, was at the very center of the most violent and devastating events, and he himself was first a participant of the Cultural Revolution and then one of its victims. So you can imagine that such a person could tell a lot of interesting things about life in China overall and the Cultural Revolution in particular. Alas, the book was hardly readable for me, regardless of what he talked about: the Cultural Revolution or his life overall. He died in 2009, almost one hundred years old.
The attempt was miserable because this book turned out to be one of the most uninformative and confusing accounts of the Cultural Revolution. I thought that personal memoirs of a man who was one of the most prominent victims during the Cultural Revolution would help to understand this important phenomenon much better than more composite, “analytical” materials. Especially considering that this person was not an ordinary man but a highly intelligent scientist, educator, and a “public intellectual.”
Ugh, no. I don’t even understand what exactly is wrong here, the personality of the author or the very subject of the Cultural Revolution (impenetrable?), but this story looks like a huge dark cluttered warehouse where you try to see something with a very weak and dull flashlight — you can see no more than several centimeters of the space near you at a time, and nothing more, and however long you move your flashlight to and fro, you cannot even form a crudest impression regarding what this place is about, how big it is, and where you are in it.
More than anything, the feelings and behavior of Xianlin Ji during the Cultural Revolution remind you of Kafka’s “The Trial” and “The Castle”: nobody understands what’s going on but somehow everybody already knows their place in this phantasmagoria and tries to be the best performer of this absurd role, negotiates about their “trial” and survival in it while no accusations were even presented and there are obviously no laws and rules there.
Yeah, the author admits this himself: “Although our motto was “Chaos confuses the enemy,” our chaos had confused no one but ourselves.” However, even this one little sentence is even more confusing — what “enemy”? why did this chaotic shit even start? what exactly people were fighting for?
The most confusing thing in everything he described was the obvious incomprehensive gap between anything that was declared (reforms, “revolutionary” intentions, transformation of society to a better one) and all those senseless tortures that regular people (not the police! not soldiers! just your fellow students, teachers, neighbors) committed over other people — and nobody even dares to think that all this is WRONG and outright CRIMINAL. No, everybody, including the author of the book, does not even bother to question the immorality and macabre atrocity of everything people did to each other. They just accepted all this as some default status and tried to survive under the circumstances. All this is completely bewildering, and no observations, explanations, or reflections of the author help even to understand why this was happening to the society — he was just part of this society and accepted everything as “their new normal.”
Xianlin Ji had a long and quite interesting life: he was born in 1911 and was a witness to all the major events in China’s history of the 20th century when he was already an adult and well-educated person. Moreover, he even studied in Germany in the 1930s and returned to China only after the Second World War. During the Cultural Revolution he, as a professor at Peking University, was at the very center of the most violent and devastating events, and he himself was first a participant of the Cultural Revolution and then one of its victims. So you can imagine that such a person could tell a lot of interesting things about life in China overall and the Cultural Revolution in particular. Alas, the book was hardly readable for me, regardless of what he talked about: the Cultural Revolution or his life overall. He died in 2009, almost one hundred years old.
March 27, 2020
THIS WAS ACTUALLY published in China, which amazed me. It came out in 1998, "a politically relaxed moment," according to the introduction (by Zha Jianying). The Cultural Revolution was such a god-awful moment--like Tiananmen Square or the famine of the late 1950s or what is happening right now with the Uighurs--that the Chinese authorities prefer to limit discussion, and a lot of the available writing about those events was published only outside China's borders. This is an exception, and it's surprisingly powerful. Slender, plain-spoken, undramatic, but powerful.
Ji Xianlin was an eminent Sanskrit and Pali scholar who taught at Peking University. He came from a peasant family and was an early supporter of the Communist revolution, so one would think he would be immune from the kind of accusations the Red Guards trafficked in...but no. Turns out he was on the wrong side of a divide in departmental politics and made an enemy of a colleague he calls "the Dowager Empress." And that was enough.
So Ji too is hauled before a "struggle session," in which the accused stand in humiliating, awkward poses while being insulted and hit with plastic-coated chains, and he too winds up in a "cowshed," a kind of work barracks where supposed capitalist-roaders learn their lessons through starvation diets, manual labor, more insults, and more beatings with plastic-coated chains.
Zha's introduction mentions that Chinese people writing or talking about "seething anger" or "unbearable pain" will often resort to "black humor or sarcastic hyperbole." Ji certainly does, providing some of the text's more remarkable moments, as when he notes what quick studies the Red Guard students were as torturers: "In fact, my students improvised ingeniously on what they had gleaned from their studies [of Buddhist hells]. Without having to build mountains of knives or fill vats with boiling oil, without any demonic aid, the Red Guard created an atmosphere of terror that far outstripped that of Buddhist creations."
A+, Red Guards!
The book's most moving moment, though, comes when Ji, dreading the summons he feels is imminent, gathers enough pills to die by suicide. He is minutes from doing so when he is arrested and hauled before his first struggle session. And...he survives it: "I realized that being stubborn towards wicked people has its advantages; after all, I am only alive now because I was too stubborn before. It turned out that I could endure greater pain than I had realized."
Ji Xianlin was an eminent Sanskrit and Pali scholar who taught at Peking University. He came from a peasant family and was an early supporter of the Communist revolution, so one would think he would be immune from the kind of accusations the Red Guards trafficked in...but no. Turns out he was on the wrong side of a divide in departmental politics and made an enemy of a colleague he calls "the Dowager Empress." And that was enough.
So Ji too is hauled before a "struggle session," in which the accused stand in humiliating, awkward poses while being insulted and hit with plastic-coated chains, and he too winds up in a "cowshed," a kind of work barracks where supposed capitalist-roaders learn their lessons through starvation diets, manual labor, more insults, and more beatings with plastic-coated chains.
Zha's introduction mentions that Chinese people writing or talking about "seething anger" or "unbearable pain" will often resort to "black humor or sarcastic hyperbole." Ji certainly does, providing some of the text's more remarkable moments, as when he notes what quick studies the Red Guard students were as torturers: "In fact, my students improvised ingeniously on what they had gleaned from their studies [of Buddhist hells]. Without having to build mountains of knives or fill vats with boiling oil, without any demonic aid, the Red Guard created an atmosphere of terror that far outstripped that of Buddhist creations."
A+, Red Guards!
The book's most moving moment, though, comes when Ji, dreading the summons he feels is imminent, gathers enough pills to die by suicide. He is minutes from doing so when he is arrested and hauled before his first struggle session. And...he survives it: "I realized that being stubborn towards wicked people has its advantages; after all, I am only alive now because I was too stubborn before. It turned out that I could endure greater pain than I had realized."
January 2, 2023
I have read a lot about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the brutality that characterized it. Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China provides a searing portrait of her own experience as a student (i.e., aggressor) in the Cultural Revolution and the fallout from her actions. That was eye-opening enough.
But Ji Xianlin's account is something else altogether. He was a professor at Peking University, where the intense brutality of student factionalism, infighting, a practices of torture against professors and staff judged to be "capitalist-roaders" began. In the book, Ji is very forthright in stating what he thinks were his own failures of character, the mistakes he may have made, the things he wish he had done differently. But ultimately, he and those like him would have failed somehow or other, since failure was inevitable. The rules changed constantly, the factions shifted, and the student Red Guard seemed to be bent on taking down any sort of authority as a show of devotion to Chairman Mao (who egged the whole process on). Ji remains a committed communist in the aftermath of the violence, and to be fair, what happened didn't really have to do with real philosophical principles but was about power, grievance, and fear. It is amazing that Ji survived and went on to have such a productive academic life.
But Ji Xianlin's account is something else altogether. He was a professor at Peking University, where the intense brutality of student factionalism, infighting, a practices of torture against professors and staff judged to be "capitalist-roaders" began. In the book, Ji is very forthright in stating what he thinks were his own failures of character, the mistakes he may have made, the things he wish he had done differently. But ultimately, he and those like him would have failed somehow or other, since failure was inevitable. The rules changed constantly, the factions shifted, and the student Red Guard seemed to be bent on taking down any sort of authority as a show of devotion to Chairman Mao (who egged the whole process on). Ji remains a committed communist in the aftermath of the violence, and to be fair, what happened didn't really have to do with real philosophical principles but was about power, grievance, and fear. It is amazing that Ji survived and went on to have such a productive academic life.
October 4, 2020
I brought this on Peking University campus in 2014, when I never heard of this writer and scholar before. He turns out to be a holy man and model scholar and the baobei (golden boy) of this most prestigious institution in China. He is a Sanskrit scholar who studied abroad in Germany during the Second World War, and he returned to China ten years later. This book is his diary during that time. It has been translated into German as well. Hi Xianlin believed in the moral decay of Europe and the West, and that China was a more advanced spiritual civilization that must never be provoked of going to war but instead getting stronger in mind, economics, learning and studying the weaknesses of your opponents. He was a great man of the highest learning. A Germanist and a Sanskritist.
January 11, 2018
interesting perspective on the cultural revolution from the standpoint of a professor who was unfairly labeled an enemy of the people and struggled against. though it doesn't paint a complete picture and leaves a lot of questions unanswered, the reasons for this are made clear within the book; the memories are simply too painful to relive. a good look into the author's psyche. a minor complaint with this book is that throughout it certain entire passages are repeated and it makes me feel like I lost where I was in the book, but it's a good book
January 26, 2022
This book is hard to read, but a great service to world history.
A cautionary tale for human societies. A kind-hearted memoir of persecution. A painful exercise in truth-telling and knowledge-keeping.
Although some will roll their eyes at this, the trendiness to "self-criticize" leading to arbitrary demonization/scapegoating of specific groups (specifically academics in this book) and the shame associated with capitalist tendencies are eerily familiar to our tendencies in the 2020s to excoriate ourselves for privilege and bias.
A cautionary tale for human societies. A kind-hearted memoir of persecution. A painful exercise in truth-telling and knowledge-keeping.
Although some will roll their eyes at this, the trendiness to "self-criticize" leading to arbitrary demonization/scapegoating of specific groups (specifically academics in this book) and the shame associated with capitalist tendencies are eerily familiar to our tendencies in the 2020s to excoriate ourselves for privilege and bias.
April 29, 2024
Hard to comprehend how a people who had always been respectful of elders could be so cruel to them when given a chance. How could there been so much evil, meanness and stupidity in the way those young red guards punished their elders. As the author said, “this period was an unprecedentedly violent, ignorant, farcical tragedy, an unforgettable disgrace to the Chinese people.” and I fully agree.
When China faces up to its past mistakes sincerely and openly admit (not punish) the wrongs, she will be a truly great nation. Unless one knows one’s wrongs, history will repeat itself.
When China faces up to its past mistakes sincerely and openly admit (not punish) the wrongs, she will be a truly great nation. Unless one knows one’s wrongs, history will repeat itself.
July 16, 2017
The only memoir I am aware of that details the experience of passing through the center of the storm of the cultural revolution. It is a vivid portrait of the group madness that can sweep through a society and the excesses that can become common place when all societal constraints are removed. Though it still seems to have been written with the desire to limit offense to those in power and to the system itself, it is surprising that such a harsh portrait was ever published in China
February 27, 2018
This is an important book for the first-hand story it relates of persecution at the hands of the Red Guards during China's Cultural Revolution. Ji's account of his experiences is told in a straight-forward manner, almost without emotion. He also reflects on his attitudes about his experiences at the time and after so many years have passed. This is an important and significant addition to the scholarly work now being published on this watershed time in China's modern history.
August 19, 2020
Very interesting book about the Chinese cultural Revolution. I have never heard of this historic event before reading this book and I was quite shocked to learn about it. His experience is so incredible and sad. In a way it is almost unbelievable that something horrible like that happened and that the Chinese government didn't recognise it and even try to erase it.
Very sad and depressing book but it is true story that needs to be known.
Very sad and depressing book but it is true story that needs to be known.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews