No Wall Too High
One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
"A masterpiece." —The Washington Post
"It was impossible. All of China was a prison in those days."
Mao Zedong’s labor reform camps, known as the laogai, were notoriously brutal. Modeled on the Soviet Gulag, they subjected their inmates to backbreaking labor, malnutrition, and vindictive wardens. They were thought to be impossible to escape—but one man did.
Xu Hongci was a bright young student at the Shanghai No. 1 Medical College, spending his days studying to be a professor and going to the movies with his girlfriend. He was also an idealistic and loyal member of the Communist Party and was generally liked and well respected. But when Mao delivered his famous February 1957 speech inviting “a hundred schools of thought [to] contend,” an earnest Xu Hongci responded by posting a criticism of the party—a near-fatal misstep. He soon found himself a victim of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, condemned to spend the next fourteen years in the laogai.
Xu Hongci became one of the roughly 550,000 Chinese unjustly imprisoned after the spring of 1957, and despite the horrific conditions and terrible odds, he was determined to escape. He failed three times before finally succeeding, in 1972, in what was an amazing and arduous triumph.
Originally published in Hong Kong, Xu Hongci’s remarkable memoir recounts his life from childhood through his final prison break. After discovering his story in a Hong Kong library, the journalist Erling Hoh tracked down the original manuscript and compiled this condensed translation, which includes background on this turbulent period, an epilogue that follows Xu Hongci up to his death, and Xu Hongci’s own drawings and maps. Both a historical narrative and an exhilarating prison-break thriller, No Wall Too High tells the unique story of a man who insisted on freedom—even under the most treacherous circumstances.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.