Prisoner of Mao

by Jean Pasqualini, Bao Ruo-Wang, Rudolph Chelminski

The ''Prisoner of Mao,'' is a harrowing account of life in China's vast apparatus of prisons and labor camps, describing how Chinese authorities used psychological techniques to coerce the innocent and the guilty into submission. It also revealed how thin the line between survival and starvation became during China's famine in the early 1960's. When the book was published in France in 1973, Mr. Pasqualini was denounced by many French supporters of China's revolution who refused to believe that the seemingly utopian nation of happy peasants and workers, as they then saw it, could have such a dark side. Only years later, after China's politically repressive regime relaxed slightly, releasing other prisoners and admitting its own excesses, did the criticism die away.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Sarah]

This was the first book about the Chinese Gulag I read, and also the best one.

[Victoria O]

I first read this book while in college many years ago and finally managed to find a used hardcover copy for my library. This look into Reeducation Through Labor during the early Mao-ist years by a half Chinese half French man is both fascinating and horrifying. When preparing food and tossing the ends of vegetables or trimmed fat I remember the authors writing of the poor food they were given, watery so-called soup with only a bit of a limp cabbage leaf and how they suffered from lack of fats in their :diet".

[Margaret]

I first read this book in college and it blew me away. Such an intense story of a prisoner of Mao in the late 50's early 60's. A journalist he was interrogated for days and eventually wrote his confession. One of my all time best books. My sister found me an out of print version which I will keep forever!

[Colin]

Wow! A powerful story.

[Christopher Nilssen]

I read this book as part of my ongoing “Communism in practice” research. It was a recommended reading from Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62: a first hand account of life inside Mao Zedong’s Communist re-education/labor camps.

The events described by Bao are harrowing, and yet he writes with such straightforward, unsensational simplicity that it’s not until near the end of the book that I really started to grasp the scope of the ordeal he and others endured. The exact number of people who were imprisoned and treated to horrific conditions of deprivation, forced labor, socially mandated bullying, and ideological conditioning is unknown due to the Chinese government’s iron-fisted control over that data, but some estimates put it over a million. The real gut-wrenching terror comes from understanding that, in this case, one was too many.

If you’ve not got the time to devote to reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Bao’s book is a shorter but incredibly detailed look into the entire process from capture to—extremely fortunate—release of an educated and observant man who escaped to a place where he could recount his experience. It is also a monumental reminder of the actual cost of policing a society’s mindshare, especially if you thought such things could only live in Orwellian fiction.

[ainsley]

4.00.

Read for HIST 317.

[Alex]

A fascinating insight into China in the 1950s, and a testament to the strength of spirit of people in adversity.