Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: No Wall Too High
WORK NOTES: trans by Erling Hoh
PSEUDONYM(S): Hongci, Xu; Xu, Hongci
BIRTHDATE: 1933-2008
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Chinese
https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/xu-hongci/1077684/ * https://us.macmillan.com/author/xuhongci/ * http://narrative.ly/author/xu-hongci/ * http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-xu-hongci-20170113-story.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1933; died 2008; married; wife’s name Oyunbileg (a nurse); children.
EDUCATION:Attended medical school.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Writer and Chinese revolutionary Xu Hongci died in 2008, and his memoir No Wall Too High was translated and published in English eight years later. The book recounts how Xu became a member of the Communist party when he was only fifteen, but nine years later the party turned on him and he was labelled a rightist. Xu then describes how his friends and girlfriend were pressured to denounce him, and in 1957 he was imprisoned in one of Mao Zedong’s labor reform camps. After serving his six-year sentence, Xu was kept in prison with no promise or hope of release, and he ultimately served fourteen years there. During that time, Xu staged four failed escape attempts, and he was finally able to escape in 1972. The author recalls each attempt in detail, as well as all he encountered in prison. Xu then writes of how he escaped into Mongolio, only to be sentenced to two years in a Mongolian prison for entering the country illegally. Xu served his time, married a Mongolian nurse, and started a family, and he was only able to return to China after Mao’s death.
As John Pomfret explained in his Washington Post assessment, “what distinguishes Xu from many other Chinese memoirists is that while many of them were bystanders caught up in the events, Xu was a true believer who passionately wanted to make a contribution to his country.” Pomfret added: “What’s amazing is that throughout his sixteen years in jail, Xu remained unbowed and convinced of the righteousness of his cause. He tried to escape four times, and he details each attempt and all the other dramatic events of his imprisonment with a painstaking sense of historical responsibility. Despite the constant surveillance and ratting, Xu held few grudges among the wardens and prisoners who persecuted him so; he knew who was to blame. ‘People become evil at the enticement of others,’ he observed. ‘If there hadn’t been a Mao Zedong, I’m sure there wouldn’t be lackeys.'”
Richard Bernstein, writing in the Los Angeles Times Online, praised No Wall Too High, calling it “a deeply personal, intimate, crushing encounter with history, specifically the tumultuous Chinese history of the second half of the 20th century.” The critic then went on to advise: “What Xu is describing in most of his book is life under the distorting, dehumanizing political pressure imposed by Maoism, which faced people with a kind of Hobbesian choice: You either played along and sided with the party against those designated as targets for revolutionary wrath or you risked becoming a target yourself. He tells a lot of stories illustrating this.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Xu, Hongci, No Wall Too High, Sarah Crichton Books (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2016, review of No Wall Too High.
Library Journal, December 1, 2016, Janet Ingraham. Dwyer, review of No Wall Too High.
Publishers Weekly, November 14, 2016, review of No Wall Too High, p. 46.
Washington Post, June 16, 2017, John Pomfret, “Once a Fervent Chinese Revolutionary, He Spent 16 years in a Communist Prison”; June 19, 2017, John Pomfret, “Book World: From Revolution to Betrayal, Then an Impossible Escape.”
ONLINE
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (January 13, 2017), review of No Wall Too High.*
Xu Hongci
Xu Hongci was sent to Mao Zedong's labor reform camps in 1957. After failed escape attempts, the young medical student broke out in 1972. He later married and built a new life. He was able to return home only after Mao's death.
Xu Hongci (1933–2008), a writer from Shanghai, was branded as a rightist in 1957 and was condemned to Mao Zedong’s labor reform camps for fourteen years. Following his escape, he lived first in Tsetserleg and then in Shanghai with his wife Oyunbileg and their children until his death in 2008.
Xu Hongci
Books
No Wall Too High
Xu Hongci (and others)
‘ONE OF THE GREATEST ESCAPE STORIES I'VE EVER READ’ MAIL ON SUNDAY
It was one of the greatest prison breaks of all time, during one of the worst totalitarian tragedies of the 20th Century.
Xu Hongci was an ordinary medical student when he was incarcerated under Mao’s regime and forced to spend years of his youth in some of China’s most brutal labour camps. Three times he tried to escape. And three times he failed. But, determined, he eventually broke free, travelling the length of China, across the Gobi desert, and into Mongolia.
This is the extraordinary memoir of his unrelenting struggle to retain dignity, integrity and freedom; but also the untold story of what life was like for ordinary people trapped in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.
Hardback eBook Paperback
Biography
Xu Hongci
It took Xu Hongci four attempts before he finally escaped the labour camps. He then travelled the length of China into Mongolia – only to be arrested and sentenced to two years in a Mongolian prison for illegally entering the country. After serving his sentence, Xu Hongci met and married a Mongolian nurse, started a family and, after Mao’s death, returned to China where he died in 2008.
Erling Hoh
Erling Hoh is a Swedish-Chinese journalist who came across a Chinese copy of Xu Hongci’s memoir in a Hong Kong library. After tracking down Xu Hongci’s Chinese publisher and, eventually, his wife and children, he obtained the original manuscript that contained much richer content than the original Chinese edition.
Xu Hongci. No Wall Too High: One Man's
Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison
Janet Ingraham Dwyer
Library Journal.
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p103.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Xu Hongci. No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison. Sarah Crichton: Farrar. Jan.
2017.336p. tr. from Chinese by Erling Hoh. maps, index. ISBN 9780374212629. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780374714321.
MEMOIR
This wrenching first-person account reveals the ugliness and brutality of China's communist regime under Mao
Zedong, through the human-scale lens of one individual's harrowing experience. As a young university student, Xu
(1933-2008) was a loyal communist with an inconvenient streak of outspokenness and independent thought. Branded a
Rightist after daring, naively and in good faith, to criticize party activities, Xu was sentenced in 1958 to six years in a
labor camp, remained imprisoned as a "post-sentence detainee," and was resentenced in 1969 to 20 years' hard labor
near the Burmese border. Against every probability, Xu broke out in 1972 and, despite the ravages of 14 years of
physical and psychological torture, made his way on foot to Mongolia by way of his mother's home in Shanghai.
Translator Hoh's notes provide sufficient historical context for readers lacking familiarity with modern Chinese history.
With an impressive recall of names and details, the author shares dozens of intimate portraits of fellow prisoners and
party cadres, and anecdotes of daily activities, all against the backdrop of systemic, mass-scale shortsightedness,
cruelty, and denial of human rights. VERDICT A somewhat flat, matter-of-fact style and a slow start through Xu's days
as a young student, shouldn't deter readers from this rare memoir. [See Prepub Alert, 7/18/16.]--Janet Ingraham Dwyer,
State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Dwyer, Janet Ingraham. "Xu Hongci. No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison."
Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 103. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371243&it=r&asid=72972b95a79fd9763bb636a70af71817.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371243
8/13/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502659240861 2/3
No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape
from Mao's Darkest Prison
Publishers Weekly.
263.46 (Nov. 14, 2016): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison
Xu Hongci, trans. from the Chinese and edited by Erling Hoh.
FSG/Crichton, $25.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-374-90126-4
Swedish journalist and translator Hoh set out to write a novel about an escape from a Chinese labor camp, but in doing
research stumbled upon something better: a real-life account of an escape that he could translate for a wider audience,
The escapee was Xu Hongci (1933-2008), a committed Chinese Communist Party member. Born to a middle-class
family during Japan's attempt "to liberate China from western imperialism," Xu grew up under Japanese occupation
and witnessed the 1947 collapse of the alliance between the Communists and Kuomintang that caused China to
descend into civil war. Xu joined the Party in 1948 and by the mid-1950s had a salary, a girlfriend, and a respectable
position in the party. But when the openness of 1957's Hundred Flowers Campaign turned into the Anti-Rightist
Campaign, Xu was branded a Rightist for his criticism and sentenced to six years of hard labor. Unable to bear the
harsh labor camps, Xu made several unsuccessful escape attempts, and finally succeeded in 1972, becoming one of few
escapees--perhaps the only one--of Mao's harshest prison. Xu recorded his story for a Chinese audience; Hoh helpfully
contextualizes events to help Western readers absorb this extraordinary account of modern Chinese history. Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 46.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473459026&it=r&asid=5f4fffc2586b2ff10505c234c17cf360.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473459026
8/13/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1502659240861 3/3
Xu Hongci: NO WALL TOO HIGH
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Xu Hongci NO WALL TOO HIGH Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 1, 17 ISBN:
978-0-374-21262-9
An early victim of Mao Zedong's totalitarian regime is swept up in a time of terror."Under Mao Zedong's dictatorship,"
writes Xu, "the Chinese people had no human rights. My history is a good example of this." So it is. By this account,
which seems to have enjoyed only modest success in its Chinese edition, Xu, born in 1933, was a loyal Communist
cadre who had "personally experienced the injustice and darkness of the old society." Two events conspired to put him
in the cross hairs: Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin's legacy in the Soviet Union and the Soviet
invasion of Hungary, both of which furthered Mao's paranoia and inspired a program of constant purges. Running afoul
of truer believers than he, Xu, a so-called class traitor, was sent to a labor camp in 1958, where he was beleaguered
with the usual denunciations: "Your heinous crimes have caused great losses to the people!" Amazingly, he managed to
escape, if only temporarily, and more than once. The path he charted each time was the most tortuous possible,
intended to shake off pursuers. When, in 1972, he succeeded, he traveled from near the Burmese border to his mother's
home in Shanghai, then crossed into Mongolia, where he lived for several years in exile until, after Mao's death, he
thought it safe to return home. Xu's narrative is of interest as a survivor's account of the camps in those early years of
the Anti-Rightist Campaign, which would precede a time of famine and then the Cultural Revolution. It is of less
interest as an adventure yarn, for the narrative is rather flat, without the dramatic pacing of, say, Papillon or Slavomir
Rawicz's genre-defining The Long Walk (1955). An often harrowing, valuable account for students of daily life in the
early years of the period culminating in China's little-documented civil war of the 1970s.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Xu Hongci: NO WALL TOO HIGH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468388936&it=r&asid=41a798b5b1d9b02f7709b001302c21f8.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468388936
Once a fervent Chinese revolutionary, he spent 16 years in a communist prison
John Pomfret
Washingtonpost.com. (June 16, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
Listen
Full Text:
Byline: John Pomfret
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. The 16 panels, tantalizingly titled "Dangerous Love," told the story of a comely Chinese civil servant, Little Li, who meets a Western man at a dinner party. The man, David, claims to be a visiting scholar but is actually a foreign spy. He cozies up to Little Li and purloins Chinese state secrets. In one of the final panels, we see Little Li sitting handcuffed before two police officers. The moral: There are spies everywhere, beware!
This year the competition to root out foreign spooks and their Chinese co-conspirators has spread nationwide. Educators in Jiangsu province rolled out a set of elementary school textbooks featuring games such as "find the spy." Authorities in Beijing offered cash rewards to citizens who reported foreign intelligence operatives and their Chinese lackeys. State media across China warned of an increasingly "severe" national security situation.
It's unclear whether these campaigns will actually dig up any moles. Nonetheless, these now-yearly endeavors 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. 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 was they who knew the most private thoughts of their loved ones. In China, the stool pigeon is the true hero of the revolution.
The results of these campaigns are well-known. In the early 1950s, the Communists dispatched millions to labor camps and executed millions more on the basis of evidence culled from those near and dear to them. 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. 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 neighbors for reading Western books, praising Western countries or, heaven forbid, watching an old Western movie.
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. Jung Chang's "Wild Swans" remains a classic. 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 immigrated to Washington after she was released from the Chinese gulag and lived there until she died in 2009.
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. Xu's memoir, which was translated and edited from the 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. In 1957, Xu was sentenced to China's gulag after he and a few classmates publicly criticized 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 was denounced by his girlfriend and his schoolmates.
Thus begins the story of Xu's 16-year life in the gulag. Throughout his odyssey, Xu suffered at the hands of his fellow inmates, who received extra food or a lighter workload in exchange for speaking ill of him. He was slapped into solitary confinement, beaten, made the subject of mass "struggle sessions" and threatened with execution. Xu's journey in Mao's gulag finally ended in 1973, when he achieved the impossible: He escaped from prison and from China, fleeing to the relative freedom of the then-People's Republic of Mongolia. Xu's translator, Hoh, is not wrong to claim that Xu is the only known escapee from Mao's prisons.
What distinguishes Xu from many other Chinese memoirists is that while many of them were bystanders caught up in the events, Xu was a true believer who passionately wanted to make a contribution to his country. He joined the underground Communist Party before the 1949 revolution at the age of 15. And in the first years following Mao's victory he participated in the often-bloody land reform movement and supported the party's goals.
But, like many well-meaning acolytes of the regime, Xu became the prey of the Communist Party, which turned on its young. To crush Xu, the party relied on those around him -- first his friends and girlfriend and later his fellow inmates -- to report on his inner thoughts and to implicate him in an endless series of "thought crimes," which essentially revolved around his undying desire to be free.
What's amazing is that throughout his 16 years in jail, Xu remained unbowed and convinced of the righteousness of his cause. He tried to escape four times, and he details each attempt and all the other dramatic events of his imprisonment with a painstaking sense of historical responsibility. Despite the constant surveillance and ratting, Xu held few grudges among the wardens and prisoners who persecuted him so; he knew who was to blame. "People become evil at the enticement of others," he observed. "If there's hadn't been a Mao Zedong, I'm sure there wouldn't be lackeys."
After China's opening to the West, Xu was allowed to return to China from Mongolia. With his Mongolian wife, he settled back in his home town, Shanghai. In 2008, a version of Xu's memoir was first published in Chinese in Hong Kong. That year, Xu died.
In 2012, the writer Erling Hoh found the memoir in a library in Hong Kong. Hoh contacted Xu's family and obtained Xu's unedited manuscript. He discovered that the Chinese version had been censored by a Chinese journalist and party member who had toned down Xu's acerbic criticism of the state. Hoh then re-translated the entire 600 pages of the original manuscript, whittling it down to a compelling read.
China's latest binge of vigilance against spies and other enemies is a reminder that those who seek to empower the snitch society remain active. To be sure, China has progressed since the dark days of the 1950s and '60s when its labor camps were stuffed full of "class enemies." Still, if you have any doubts about the tenacity of the hold that China's repressive system exerts on its people, ponder for a bit the fate of Lee Bo, the Hong Kong bookseller who published the Chinese edition of Xu's book. In the spring of 2016, just as China was ramping up its National Security Day campaign, Chinese agents kidnapped Lee from Hong Kong and smuggled him over the border into China. There Lee was held for several weeks incommunicado and ordered to stop publishing books that exposed the troubled history of the Chinese Communist Party.
Book World: From revolution to betrayal, then an impossible escape
John Pomfret
The Washington Post. (June 19, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Byline: John Pomfret
No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape From Mao's Darkest Prison
By Xu Hongci. Translated by Erling Hoh
Sarah Crichton/Farrar Straus Giroux. 314 pp. $27
---
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. The 16 panels, tantalizingly titled "Dangerous Love," told the story of a comely Chinese civil servant, Little Li, who meets a Western man at a dinner party. The man, David, claims to be a visiting scholar but is actually a foreign spy. He cozies up to Little Li and purloins Chinese state secrets. In one of the final panels, we see Little Li sitting handcuffed before two police officers. The moral: There are spies everywhere, beware!
This year, the competition to root out foreign spooks and their Chinese co-conspirators has spread nationwide. Educators in Jiangsu province rolled out a set of elementary school textbooks featuring games such as "find the spy." Authorities in Beijing offered cash rewards to citizens who reported foreign intelligence operatives and their Chinese lackeys. State media across China warned of an increasingly "severe" national security situation.
It's unclear whether these campaigns will actually dig up any moles. Nonetheless, these now-yearly endeavors 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. 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. In China, the stool pigeon is the true hero of the revolution.
The results of these campaigns are well-known. In the early 1950s, the Communists dispatched millions to labor camps and executed millions more on the basis of evidence culled from those near and dear to them. 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. 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 neighbors for reading Western books, praising Western countries or, heaven forbid, watching an old Western movie.
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. Jung Chang's "Wild Swans" remains a classic. 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 immigrated to Washington after she was released from the Chinese gulag and lived there until she died in 2009.
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. 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. In 1957, Xu was sentenced to China's gulag after he and a few classmates publicly criticized 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 was denounced by his girlfriend and his schoolmates.
Thus begins the story of Xu's 16-year life in the gulag. Throughout his odyssey, Xu suffered at the hands of his fellow inmates, who received extra food or a lighter workload in exchange for speaking ill of him. He was slapped into solitary confinement, beaten, made the subject of mass "struggle sessions" and threatened with execution. Xu's journey in Mao's gulag finally ended in 1973, when he achieved the impossible: He escaped from prison and from China, fleeing to the relative freedom of the then-People's Republic of Mongolia. Xu's translator, Hoh, is not wrong to claim that Xu is the only known escapee from Mao's prisons.
What distinguishes Xu from many other Chinese memoirists is that while many of them were bystanders caught up in the events, Xu was a true believer who passionately wanted to make a contribution to his country. He joined the underground Communist Party before the 1949 revolution at the age of 15. And in the first years following Mao's victory he participated in the often-bloody land reform movement and supported the party's goals.
But, like many well-meaning acolytes of the regime, Xu became the prey of the Communist Party, which turned on its young. To crush Xu, the party relied on those around him - first his friends and girlfriend and later his fellow inmates - to report on his inner thoughts and to implicate him in an endless series of "thought crimes," which essentially revolved around his undying desire to be free.
What's amazing is that throughout his 16 years in jail, Xu remained unbowed and convinced of the righteousness of his cause. He tried to escape four times, and he details each attempt and all the other dramatic events of his imprisonment with a painstaking sense of historical responsibility. Despite the constant surveillance and ratting, Xu held few grudges among the wardens and prisoners who persecuted him so; he knew who was to blame. "People become evil at the enticement of others," he observed. "If there's hadn't been a Mao Zedong, I'm sure there wouldn't be lackeys."
After China's opening to the West, Xu was allowed to return to China from Mongolia. With his Mongolian wife, he settled back in his home town, Shanghai. In 2008, a version of Xu's memoir was first published in Chinese in Hong Kong. That year, Xu died.
In 2012, the writer Erling Hoh found the memoir in a library in Hong Kong. Hoh contacted Xu's family and obtained Xu's unedited manuscript. He discovered that the Chinese version had been censored by a Chinese journalist and party member who had toned down Xu's acerbic criticism of the state. Hoh then re-translated the entire 600 pages of the original manuscript, whittling it down to a compelling read.
China's latest binge of vigilance against spies and other enemies is a reminder that those who seek to empower the snitch society remain active. To be sure, China has progressed since the dark days of the 1950s and '60s when its labor camps were stuffed full of "class enemies." Still, if you have any doubts about the tenacity of the hold that China's repressive system exerts on its people, ponder for a bit the fate of Lee Bo, the Hong Kong bookseller who published the Chinese edition of Xu's book. In the spring of 2016, just as China was ramping up its National Security Day campaign, Chinese agents kidnapped Lee from Hong Kong and smuggled him over the border into China. There, Lee was held for several weeks incommunicado and ordered to stop publishing books that exposed the troubled history of the Chinese Communist Party.
---
Pomfret is an editor at large at SupChina and the author of "The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, From 1776 to the Present."
Xu Hongci - Mao's victim, freedom's hero - tells his story in 'No Wall Too High'
Xu Hongci
Xu Hongci told the story of his daring escape from China's gulag in "No Wall Too High." (Courtesy of Xu family)
Richard Bernstein
Xu Hongci is a legend in a certain Chinese subculture: The estimated 550,000 people who were accused of being “rightists” in Mao Zedong’s purge of the late 1950s and spent 20 years or more as inmates of China’s gulag archipelago. In that large crowd of unjustly, illegally imprisoned people, Xu is the only person known to have escaped and made a free life in another country. Not surprisingly, his account of how he accomplished that remarkable feat is at the center of “No Wall Too High,” one of the most compelling and moving memoirs to emerge from Communist China, which is now appearing in English for the first time.
The actual escape, which took Xu on a clandestine journey of many thousands of miles, is absolutely heart-stopping, material for a Hollywood thriller. But Xu’s book is more than that. It is the story of a deeply personal, intimate, crushing encounter with history, specifically the tumultuous Chinese history of the second half of the 20th century. It is also a story of remarkable human endurance, of a refusal to be crushed, of the will to be free.
Xu was born in 1933, just as China was being engulfed in the long years of war and civil war that ended in the Chinese Communists coming to power in 1949. He was from a family whose middle-class circumstances were sharply reduced when Japan embarked on its full-scale invasion of China in 1937. When Japan was defeated and civil war loomed between the ruling Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists of Mao Zedong, Xu, at the tender age of 14, joined the Communist Party. In the early years of Maoist rule, he became a student at the Shanghai No. 1 Medical College. He fell in love. The future looked bright.
But then he fell victim to one of Mao's more insidiously destructive gestures. In 1956, the Great Helmsman invited the country's intellectuals to express themselves freely. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend,” was the operative slogan. Taking the Great Leader at his word, Xu wrote a big character poster (the text of which is in an appendix to his book) raising numerous criticisms, among them China's “mechanical aping of the Soviet Union.” For his efforts, Xu was declared a rightist and sent off to China’s gulag. Fourteen years and several prisons later, unable to endure the hunger, the psychological and physical torture, the hard labor and the humiliations of incarceration as a “counter-revolutionary,” he made his unlikely, hair-raising escape.
A deeply personal, intimate, crushing encounter with history, specifically the tumultuous Chinese history of the second half of the 20th century.
Xu's story has a sort of happy ending. His escape was to Mongolia, where he married and had children. He was able to return to Shanghai permanently in 1984, when, with Mao dead, China “reversed the verdicts” that had been declared against Xu and his fellow “rightists.” He then wrote a 572-page memoir, which was published in Hong Kong in 2008, shortly before his death of kidney cancer at age 74. This English version has been deftly edited and translated by Erling Hoh, a Chinese writer living in Sweden, who has provided helpful notes explaining the historical context for each stage of Xu's life.
Among the many virtues of the book is the prickly richness of the people that Xu encounters along his tortured itinerary. There are the teenagers in Shanghai who introduced him to left-wing politics in the 1940s. There’s his girlfriend, who, after Xu was declared a rightist, yielded to the intense pressure to denounce him in the public “struggle” sessions he was forced to endure. There are his fellow prisoners, those who, like him, resisted and tried to escape; others who turned into lackeys, toadies and informants — like the one who denounced Xu for placing a stamp with a portrait of Mao on its side. There is a succession of jailers, a rare one here and there who tried, at least a little, to mitigate the harshness of life in China's gulag, but many more who displayed a kind of sycophantic cruelty trying to impress highups with their revolutionary fervor.
What Xu is describing in most of his book is life under the distorting, dehumanizing political pressure imposed by Maoism, which faced people with a kind of Hobbesian choice: You either played along and sided with the party against those designated as targets for revolutionary wrath or you risked becoming a target yourself. He tells a lot of stories illustrating this, including his own first, unforgettable experience of revolutionary violence when he was 19. He saw crowds whipped into a frenzy against enemies of the people, who were then publicly executed. Xu was nauseated. “But this was revolution,” he told himself, “and if I wanted to be a revolutionary, I would have to toughen up.”
Orwellian absurdity is the leitmotif here. Xu's original sentence was for six years, but once he’d served that time (during which he tried and failed twice to escape), he was kept in prison as what was euphemistically called a “post-sentence detainee.” Then, during the great Maoist purge known as the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, he was sentenced to an additional 20 years as an “irredeemable reactionary element.” Tortured, beaten with a rifle butt, racked by hunger, paraded through the streets before a howling mob, his hands so swollen he could barely hold a pen, he was nonetheless forced to sign the court’s verdict. It’s hardly a surprise that, when he manages to cross the border into Mongolia, he feels “overjoyed to have escaped once and for all from the grim, merciless clutches of the Communist dictatorship.”
“China's tragedy,” Xu writes in at one point, “is that it will never allow people to speak the truth.” Things are better in China than they were during the years of Xu’s ordeal, but his own attempt to tell the truth about the Maoist dystopia illustrates the accuracy of his prediction. The party has banned dwelling on the mistakes of the past, which means that “No Wall Too High,” gripping and inspiring as it is, has never been published in mainland China.
Richard Bernstein is a former foreign correspondent for Time magazine and the New York Times. His most recent book is “China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice.”
'No Wall Too High' by Xu Hongci
'No Wall Too High' by Xu Hongci (Sarah Crichton Books / Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“No Wall Too High: One Man’s Daring Escape from Mao’s Darkest Prison”
Xu Hongci, edited and translated by Erling Hoh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 336 pp., $27