China's first literary dissident's Kafkaesque journey through the prisons of the Cultural Revolution
Mei Zhi (1914-2004), originally known as Tu Qihua, was born in
Changzhou, Jiangsu. She joined the Left-Wing Writers' Union in
1932. In 1944, she joined the All-China Anti-Japanese Association
of Literary and Art Circles. She helped Hu Feng edit the literary
periodicals July and Hope. In the 1930s she began writing essays,
novels, children's stories and poetry. She published several books
of poems for children. In 1955, she was forced after the attack on
Hu Feng to stop her creative work. In 1980, after Hu Feng's
rehabilitation, she was appointed as a writer in residence of the
Chinese Writers' Association. As well as resuming her writing for
children, she published a large number of memoirs and essays,
including the present book and a full-length biography of Hu
Feng.
Gregor Benton is Professor Emeritus of Chinese History at Cardiff.
He has published twelve prior books on Marxism, political humor,
the history of the Chinese Communist Party, Red guerillas in the
1930s, the Sino-Japanese War, dissent in China, Chinese Trotskyism,
Hong Kong, the theory of moral economy, and overseas Chinese. His
Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China,
1934-1938 (1992) won several awards, including the Association of
Asian Studies' prize for the best book on modern China.
What kind of people are those we don't execute? We don't execute
people like Hu Feng ... not because their crimes don't deserve
capital punishment but because such executions would yield no
advantage ... Counterrevolutionaries are trash, they are vermin,
but once in your hands, you can make them perform some kind of
service for the people.
*Mao Zedong*
A brilliant literary writer and critic ... [F: Hu Feng's Prison
Years] is a vivid portrayal of the suffocating intellectual life of
Mao's years.
*China Report*
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