A personal account of life in the orbit of Mao and Zhao En-Lai and
one woman's effort to tell what it was like to be at the center of
the storm. The history of China in the twentieth century is
comprised of a long series of shocks: the 1911 revolution, the
civil war between the communists and the nationalists, the Japanese
invasion, the revolution, the various catastrophic campaigns
initiated by Chairman Mao between 1949 and 1976, its great opening
to the world under Deng, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Yuan-tsung Chen, who is now 90, lived through most of it, and at
certain points in close proximity to the seat of communist power.
Born in Shanghai in 1929, she came to know Zhou En-Lai-second only
to Mao in importance-as a young girl while living in Chongqing,
where Chiang Kai-Shek's government had relocated to, during the war
against Japan. That connection to Zhou helped her save her
husband's life in Cultural Revolution. After the communists took
power, she obtained a job in one of the culture ministries. While
there, she frequently engaged with the upper echelon of the party
and was a first-hand witness to some of the purges that the regime
regularly initiated. Eventually, the commissar she worked under was
denounced in 1957, and she barely escaped being purged herself.
Later, during Cultural Revolution, she and her husband were purged
and sent to live in a rough, poor area. She and her husband finally
moved to Hong Kong, with Zhou's special permission, in 1971. A
first-hand account of what life was like in the period before the
revolution and in Mao's China, The Secret Listener gives a unique
perspective on the era, and Chen's vantage point provides us with a
new perspective on the Maoist regime-one of the most radical
political experiments in modern history and a force that genuinely
changed the world.
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