Victims of the Cultural Revolution by Wang Youqin
Victims of the Cultural Revolution | Testimonies of China’s Tragedy by Wang Youqin details with individual accounts, the horror the of the Cultural Revolution against the citizens of China.
Between 500,000 to 2 million people died in the Cultural Revolution. Yet a silence remains as to why.
Over eleven years in Mao’s China, an all-out assault on ‘class enemies’ took place. Teenagers smashed their teachers’ skulls. Doctors were tortured in jail as foreign spies. Ordinary people condemned ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to execution – and then went home and ate their dinner.
This was less than fifty years ago. But the victims are being forgotten already. Wang Youqin unmasks the true brutality of the Cultural Revolution. Documenting the deaths of over six hundred individuals, Victims of the Cultural Revolution calls on us to remember the evil ideological fanaticism wreaks and pays tribute to all those who suffered.
Wang Youqin is a Senior Instructional Professor in Chinese language at the University of Chicago. She has been researching the Cultural Revolution since 2004 and maintains a memorial website for its victims.
- ISBN: 9780861542239
- 592 pages
- February 23, 2023
Published by: One World Publications
Reviews
Name the dead: Saving China’s victims from oblivion
By Frank Dikötter | TLS | May 5, 2023
When she was stationed in Beijing as a correspondent for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realize that even while the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) continued to shape the country’s present, it existed, for the greatest part, as an absence. The regime has conspired to repress all memory of those years, creating a state of official amnesia. Wang Youqin, who experienced the Cultural Revolution at first hand, has devoted herself to challenging that stance. Although both these authors are committed to remembering, however, Branigan restricts herself to stories that are quite familiar.
Read more of the Victims of the Cultural Revolution book review.
