Blood Red Sunset: A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
"We were dupes of class struggle" the author says of the 1966-76 national aberration known as the Cultural Revolution, "made to howl at the moon like a pack of dogs." When the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party launched the One-Smash-and-Three-Oppose Campaign in 1970, the author was a fervent Red Guard. But his best friend betrayed him and Ma Bo was denounced as an "active counterrevolutionary," charged with slandering Chairman Mao and sentenced to labor reform in the quarries of Inner Mongolia. An irrepressible, pugnacious young man, Ma Bo launched a campaign to convince the authorities to reopen his case. The upshot was a period of official ostracism and personal isolation; how he managed to cope with this while suffering the tortures of unrequited love forms a major portion of this compelling memoir. In 1976 the Party unexpectedly changed the verdict on him to "serious political errors" and ordered his conditional release. A huge bestseller in China, this richly detailed record is told with raw narrative power. Ma Bo is writer-in-residence at Brown University.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.