The Bamboo Gulag: Human Rights in the People's Republic of China, 1991-1992

Abstract

dissatisfaction with the perceived flaws in an imported development strategy, but was a reaction to domestic socio-political changes. The early 1950s had been characterized from the very outset by "errors of economic planning and...serious pathologies of the political system [that] carried within them, in Henan, the seeds of the 'unreason' of later years" (p. 34). A succession of repressive movements had created a discontented population prudently passive, sometimes resigned and maintaining "a sort of grumblers' solidarity." It was in order to "seize back a lost legitimacy" through "an act of will" (p. 168) that the CCP Chairman vowed to put China ahead of the United Kingdom in 15 years and the First Secretary of Henan promised that "his" province would see the arrival of "mature communism" even earlier. It is to be hoped that this book will one day become a point of departure for a second study, not on the origins but on the aftermath of the Great Leap in Henan. Given the extent of the disaster that befell the province in 1959-61, such a sequel very much needs to be written. Meanwhile we must remain content with a case study that stops short of telling us how 1.136 million perished (the official death toll in the hardest-hit district of Xinyang) but goes a long way towards explaining why.