![]() But when the Communists came into power in 1949, like most educated Chinese at the time, Ji saw hope for a stronger nation and more just society.īeing a political drifter, however, was no longer an option. Though disliking the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek regime, he stayed away from politics, a field he’d never had any interest in. to teach at China’s preeminent Peking University, where he soon became the chairman of its Eastern Languages Department. Having spent a decade in Germany studying Sanskrit and other languages, Ji returned with a Ph.D. Son of an impoverished rural family in Shandong, Ji had managed, through diligence and scholarship, to get a solid, cosmopolitan education in republican China. Like other ordinary Chinese, Ji had no idea what the Cultural Revolution was all about when Mao Zedong launched it in 1966. The delicate circumstances surrounding Ji’s memoir in China, in a way, demonstrate both the entangled complexity of the events and the precarious state of historical testimony. How much can we really make sense of a bizarre, unwieldy phenomenon like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? Can we truly overcome barriers of limited information, fading historical memory, and persistent ideological biases to have a genuinely meaningful and illuminating conversation about it today? I wonder. Reading Ji’s account again, however, has also renewed some of my old questions and frustrations. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of that period. ![]() The present English edition, skillfully translated by Chenxin Jiang, is a welcome, valuable addition to the small body of work in this genre. But authorities also quietly took steps to restrict public discussion of the memoir, as its subject continues to be treated as sensitive. The book has sold well and stayed in print. With genial, grandfatherly manners, he had become, in his august age, one of those avuncular figures revered by the public and loved by the media. A celebrated Indologist, Ji was also a popular essayist and an avowed patriot who enjoyed good relations with the government. Originally published by an official press in Beijing in 1998, during a politically relaxed moment, The Cowshed probably benefited from the author’s eminent status in China. Disturbed by the collective silence of the older generation and the growing ignorance of the young people about the Cultural Revolution, he finally decided to take up the pen himself. In the opening chapter, he confessed to having waited for many years, in vain, for others to come forward with a testimony. ![]() To mentally relive such darkness and to record it all in such an unswervingly candid manner could not have been easy for an elderly man: Ji was over eighty at the time of writing. After reading the book, a Chinese intellectual friend summed it up to me: “This is our Auschwitz.” Indeed, of all the memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, I cannot think of another one that offers such a devastatingly direct and detailed testimony on the physical and mental abuse an entire imprisoned intellectual community suffered. The inferno atmosphere of the place, the chilling variety of physical and psychological violence the guards daily inflicted on the convicts with sadistic pleasure, the starvation and human degeneration-all are vividly described. This one was set up at the heart of the Peking University campus, where the author was locked up for nine months with throngs of other fallen professors and school officials, doing manual labor and reciting tracts of Mao’s writing. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly.Īt the center of the book is the cowshed, the popular term for makeshift detention centers that had sprung up in many Chinese cities at the time. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Provincial Party Secretary Wang Yilun, being criticized by Red Guards from the University of Industry and forced to bear a placard with the accusation “counterrevolutionary revisionist element,” Harbin, China, August 23, 1966īy now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject.
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