Snag Your Copy The Cowshed: Memories Of The Chinese Cultural Revolution Crafted By Ji Xianlin Accessible From Digital Format

is nothing wrong with the book I probably was not the best audience for it, I read it in hopes of better understanding the Cultural Revolution for teaching the memoir Red Scarf Girl to middle schoolers, and I did not come away with much to help me in that respect, although I did gain a new understanding of the brutality of those who were impacted by it.
It is almost impossible for anybody not caught up in the Cultural Revolution to comprehend the mass hysteria that led to so much wanton destruction and the deliberate degradation and humiliation of half a generation of prominent intellectuals.
Ji's lighthearted tone belies

a fierce rage that forces the reader to confront the demons in human nature exactly as did the writings of Primo Levi.
Kind of like the Gulag Archipelago but inferior in every category desu, As a firsthand account of the Cultural Revolution at Peking University, this book is invaluable, But Ji Xianlin is no Primo Levi don't trust him on the broad strokes, His vision can be surprisingly narrow, For example:

"On a July or August day when the sun was at its hottest, I caught sight of the party secretary staring at the noonday sun.
A guard, a biology student, was sitting nearby in the shade, From ancient feudal societies built on slavery to modern capitalist societies, has anyone devised a punishment like this

Yes, actually, they have.
Often. Ji studied in Berlin during the War he should know,

Ji is unapologetically nationalist, He continues to support the Communist Party, As a result he can describe the Cultural Revolution but not explain it, To his credit, he acknowledges this shortcoming, Unfortunately for the reader, we are left wanting more,

"If we refuse to study this problem," Ji writes in the conclusion, "we leave it to foreigners to continue to do so.
" Alas, he is still correct, The foreign perspective will never be as accurate as the Chinese one could be, But what can we do, "Regardless of whether their foreigners' work addresses the most crucial issues, honesty is better than lies, " 是的 我们继续吧 "It made me feel just how cruel human beings could be to each other, but it also saved my life, If I could survive this, I decided, I had nothing more to fear, "

The Chinese Cultural Revolution is perhaps the strangest and saddest instance of societal selfharm that a modern country has ever produced.
Over the course of a decade, perhaps hundreds of thousands of China's most educated people were subjected to a grueling experience of statesponsored humiliation at the hands of their fellow citizens.
Oftentimes their persecutors were young cadres known as Red Guards, What happened was a mass atrocity, but not a genocide, There were no extermination camps and few if any mass executions, It was more like a form of psychological and physical brutality that had become encouraged and institutionalized by the state, Every day for years professors, intellectuals, artists and others deemed somehow bourgeoise were taken out of their homes to be jeered, spat upon and beaten by "the masses.
" Elderly were taken away to camps and made to work in the blazing sun, moving stacks of coal by hand and being fed gruel by abusive prison guards.
All this was ordered by Mao Zedong, ostensibly in the name of reeducating society for the better and getting rid of archaic ways of thinking.
In practice, it was totally unmoored from any appreciable logic or plan,

Ji Xianlin was a professor of Sanskrit who was deemed an ideological deviant during the revolution, This memoir, which he writes with angst and a mirthful humor, is his personal account of this period, It doesn't provide an overall picture of the Cultural Revolution, nor does it aim to, It is simply his experience, but, as the saying goes, one can often discern the existence of the ocean from a drop of water.
Xianlin and other scholars from his university most of them jewels of erudition and knowledge that China should have been proud to produce were reduced to a class of people somehow less than human.
There are many bizarre and moving episodes that he recounts, After being made to hold the airplane torture position by his tormentors, he starts practicing the position at home to better strengthen his legs for future torture sessions.
At one point, after a horrifying public "struggle session," Xianlian makes a meticulous plan to kill himself with sleeping pills and die in front of Beijing's Old Summer Palace.
These plans are aborted only after Red Guards come knocking at his door to take him away for further public humiliation, After this, he changes his mind, He decides to continue living after concluding that he had already been through the worst and that life could have nothing more unbearable in store for him.


The Cultural Revolution almost completely deracinated Chinese society, It destroyed a rich history and culture, While it was undertaken with some loftysounding Maoist justifications, like many other revolutions it quickly opened up into a freeforall in which individual psychopaths were freed to indulge their worst impulses.
Xianlin wrote this book many decades after the revolution had ended, As he says, he wrote it only after it had become clear that Chinese society was not planning to have any real reckoning with what had occurred during that time.
Even then, the manuscript was kept hidden for six years before publishing, The book that he wrote is honest and personal, Somehow throughout all the pain, Xianlin manages to see the irony in his "MarxistLeninist" persecution, He leaves out many names and says that he has no desire to seek revenge for what occurred, Despite all the horrors he personally went through and witnessed, he has written a book that could genuinely be filed as constructive criticism.


Xianlin is a real patriot who loves and believes in his China intensely, He didn't turn against China even after being deemed its enemy, Indeed, he became an even more committed nationalist in later years in service of what he now saw as a proud and rising nation.
The harsh criticism in this book is itself deemed a service to China, It's worth remembering that Xi Jinping was also similarly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and has now risen to the head of state.
As Xianlin's book shows, China is a country of many tough and formidable people who have very recently been through hardships that few Westerners alive today can appreciate.
I recommend this to anyone interested in China, albeit those who are already somewhat familiar with the basic arc of its modern history.
This is an important book for the firsthand story it relates of persecution at the hands of the Red Guards during China's Cultural Revolution.
Ji's account of his experiences is told in a straightforward manner, almost without emotion, He also reflects on his attitudes about his experiences at the time and after so many years have passed, This is an important and significant addition to the scholarly work now being published on this watershed time in China's modern history, The only memoir I am aware of that details the experience of passing through the center of the storm of the cultural revolution.
It is a vivid portrait of the group madness that can sweep through a society and the excesses that can become common place when all societal constraints are removed.
Though it still seems to have been written with the desire to limit offense to those in power and to the system itself, it is surprising that such a harsh portrait was ever published in China This book is hard to read, but a great service to world history.


A cautionary tale for human societies, A kindhearted memoir of persecution, A painful exercise in truthtelling and knowledgekeeping,

Although some will roll their eyes at this, the trendiness to "selfcriticize" leading to arbitrary demonization/scapegoating of specific groups specifically academics in this book and the shame associated with capitalist tendencies are eerily familiar to our tendencies in thes to excoriate ourselves for privilege and bias.
A compelling personal account of a tragically nonsensical and brutal period in human history, Told in a wry, ironic style which may have helped the author to deal with the emotions around his memories it also helps to shield the reader somewhat from the outrage caused by reading of such chaos and inhumanity.
Forthright account of the Chinese Cultural Revolutionby a professor who experienced the insanity, For a decade, groups of Red Guards hyper partisan, self righteous college students, with workers and others engaged in a "continuous revolution" against anyone allegedly not true to Communist values.
Confusingly, groups had gang style fights against each other, all claiming to be true followers of Mao and communism, Unsurprisingly though, people were often persecuted for personal vendettas, for the sake of power, or out of our sadism, This led to widespread violence, murders, public chaos, and public humiliations in so called "struggle sessions, " This book focuses primarily on one professor's experience with these public humiliations, imprisonment, and physical violence,

Given today's censor crazy regime, it's amazing to me the CCP allowed a book like this to be published, but the earlys were a different time.
Even then, the author, Ji Xianlin, is still very careful to criticize the Cultural Revolution only, not Mao or the CCP that promoted a decade of lawless internal "revolution.
"

The Cultural Revolution isn't spoken of too often these days, but it's one of those historical events that so many lessons can be drawn from.
Like the chaos that ensues when political positions are pulled ever further to the extremes, It's hard not to draw connections to the French Revolutions reign of terror, The dangers of one party rule are evident, because there is no counterbalancing force or opinions to point out errors, Free speech rights, of course, would have been necessary for the latter to occur, Those rights were not and are not something the CCP has ever tolerated though,

It's hard not to also see the dangers of idealism disconnected from reality, That the Cultural Revolution was embraced by so many college students isn't shocking in this regard, I'm my experience, as a group students tend towards idealism, making them ripe for extreme positions, While nothing on the level of the Cultural Revolution, the protests American students have waged against universities, free speech rights, and in support of far left positions, has a concerning similarity.


This book is worth reading for many reasons, not just the lessons it draws, The author sincerely desired that as a country, China would reflect on the chaos and insanity of the Cultural Revolution, so that something like it would never occur again.
Whether that introspection occurred in the past three decades, I have no idea, That's not just a lesson for China though, Any country though should be willing to review its past sins, take an honest look at the causes, and take steps to ensure history doesn't repeat itself.
Such review didn't have to be all self righteous chest beating and insistence on extreme solutions, Education and an honest look at what happened, that it was wrong, and that it should not occur again, can help a country move forward.


If you read the book, this isn't a traditional American style memoir, The author focuses on the cultural revolution and starts the story there, If you want his background first, there's an essay on the appendix you could start with, The author also wrote for the Chinese who lived through these events, so a certain familiarity with China's history in the early to midth century is helpful.
It's not required to get the overall point though, A fairly straightforward account of one man's sufferings during the GPCR The sardonic tone seems to survive translation well, Here is a very rare book a Chinese intellectual who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution who has written about it as well as his evolving thoughts on it.
It is rare because hardly any Chinese persecuted has written about it, and what is even more rare is that no Red Guard persecutor has written about his or her experiences.
Books on the Cultural Revolution have tended to be written by foreigners,

Through this book, one gets an appreciation too of how forward thinking the main universities in Beijing were, the author himself specializing in Sanskrit for example, and one can't help wondering how much more China would have progressed without theyear Cultural Revolution.
.