Mao's People: Sixteen Portraits of Life in Revolutionary China / Edition 1

by B. Michael Frolic

Overview

"How do we apply Chairman Mao's Thought to get fat pigs?" Squad Leader Ho (who knew the most about pigs) replied that, according to Chairman Mao, one must investigate the problem fully from all sides, and then integrate practice and theory. Ho concluded that the reason for our skinny pigs had to be found in one of three areas: the relationship between the pigs and their natural environment (excluding man); the relationship between the cadres and the pigs; and the relationship among the pigs themselves.

And so the city slickers, sent down to the countryside for political reeducation, set out to find the Thousand-Dollar Pig, much to the bemusement of the local peasants.

The sixteen stories collected in this remarkable book give firsthand accounts of daily life in contemporary China. From 250 interviews conducted in Hong Kong between 1972 and 1976, Mr. Frolic has created charming vignettes that show how individuals from all parts of China led their lives in the midst of rapid social change and political unrest. We hear about oil prospectors, rubber growers, and factory workers, Widow Wang and her sit-in to get a larger apartment, the thoroughly corrupt Man Who Loved Dog Meat, the young people who flew kites to protest antidemocratic tendencies.

As fresh and original as the individual accounts are, common and timeless themes emerge: the sluggishness of an agrarian society in responding to modernization; the painful lack of resources in a poor and gigantic country; the constraints imposed on common people by the bureaucracy; the way in which individuals outwardly support the system and inwardly resist it; the limitations of heavy and conflicting doses of ideology in motivating individuals.

But there are also recurrent motifs of economic and social progress: production rises, illiteracy declines, and socialist values have impact. A new China has emerged, though change is occurring far more slowly than its leaders had intended.

Mao's People contains much new information on China both for the general reader and for specialists in the field. Above all, it is a completely engrossing and vivid glimpse into the ways of a nation we are only beginning to discover.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674548459
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/15/1981
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	291
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

B. Michael Frolic is Professor of Political Science, York University, Toronto.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Thousand-Dollar Pig

A May 7 Cadres School in Henan

A Foot of Mud and a Pile of Shit

Change in a Northern Village

Chairman Mao's Letter to Li

City Girl in the Countryside

Oil Man

Twenty Years of Oil Exploration

Down with Stinking Intellectuals

The Revolution at A moy University

Little Brother's Wedding

Tradition in the Countryside

Return to the Motherland

Searching for Roots in China

Eating Pears in Fuzhou

Privilege, the Army, and Controls

Frontier Town

Life Among the Tibetans

Kill the Chickens To Scare the Monkeys

The Cultural Revolution in a Peking Office

The One Whose Girlfriend Turned Him In

A Political Mistake That Cost a Career

Rubber Man

The Army Grows Rubber on Hainan Island

The One Who Loved Dog Meat

How a Bad Element Survived for Twenty-Five Years

My Neighborhood

City Life and the Residents' Committee

The Apprentice

Production and Politics in a Wuhan Factory

Flying Kites on White Cloud Mountain

China's Youth at the Center of Change

Notes

Editorial Reviews

For those who wish to gain a sense of the diversity and divisiveness of Chinese life between 1966 and 1974, this book is invaluable... Altogether, these portraits are so fresh, so poignant, and so exquisitely 'human' that after finishing this absorbing book one feels like one of Frolic's informants who, looking back on his life in the 'motherland,' doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

New Republic

Often touching and sometimes funny, rich in anecdotes... it's a book about coping and surviving, about wangling and finagling and getting on in the revolution... these painstakingly recorded narratives are the most telling bits of self-expression from Mao's China that we have had.

New York Times

Skillfully edited... One possibly learns more about the social and psychological realities of China from the words of the survivors themselves than from any other recent book. Protected by anonymity, the informants are candid, devastating, and funny.

New York Times Book Review