Exploring the Chinese Revolution from the perspective of a middle-class engineer.
By Peter Tang ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2022
In Tang’s debut memoir, he recounts his life in Maoist China, beginning in 1949 when the Chinese Community Party took power. Growing up in the city of Wuxi in eastern China, his middle-class parents were early targets of the revolution. His father, a lawyer, was reduced to poverty and working as a workshop cleaner. Despite this, Tang was able to secure admission to the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics based on his academic record. Unfortunately, he was unaware of the internal politics of the CCP and requested a military position that matched his academic training, leading to his arrest for being part of a “counterrevolutionary clique” and a two-year sentence that stretched into 15 years in a hard labor camp. The memoir is divided into two parts, the first focusing on his life in China and the second on his life after his release and immigration to the United States. Tang’s story not only recounts the brutality of life in China, but also serves as a political treatise that condemns the violent excesses of Maoist communism while praising the political freedoms and free market economy of the United States. He notes the irony that the entrepreneurial spirit that landed him in prison decades ago has “become all the fashion in Party circles” in 21st-century China. The book is filled with photographs, snapshots, and drawings of prison camps, making it a deeply personal and engrossing memoir.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2022
ISBN: 9798822901254
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2023