The atrocities of the Daoxian story, which cannot have been unique at that time, strongly recall accounts of wanton cruelty in the wars at the fall of the Tang, or during the Five Dynasties – or, indeed, accounts from the Second World War in Eastern Europe: it was not just in China that people in our own time turned with such savagery against their old neighbours in a world where, just as in Nazi Germany, language itself was debased by totalitarianism.
