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The Golden Road describes a young man of humble urban origins in
China's lower Yangzi Valley who foresees the opportunities for
wealth and position in the early years of Deng Xiaoping's "reform
and opening up" policies and who then over the next twenty years
creates a diversified business empire. This novel thus tells of the
reemergence in China of a dynamic, often reckless and shady,
commercial class during the momentous transformation of that
country during the Deng Xiaoping era. Business people used many
tricks as well as connections with the local power structure to
survive and succeed in the fiercely competitive business world of
China in the 1980's and 1990's. However, quite apart from
presenting a picture of the roiling business world of post-Maoist
China, The Golden Road is a bildungsroman of a young man's coming
of age and his education in life through his successive
relationships with four beautiful, talented, but indeed very
different, women and the effect they had on him. As Harvard
Professor of Chinese Literature, David Der-wei Wang writes in his
incisive foreword to this book, the author, Zhang Da-Peng has made
a significant contribution to the relatively new (by the timeline
of Chinese literature) but vibrant tradition of Chinese novels
portraying the endeavors of businessmen and their interactions with
society in times of major social change.
On Oct 1, 1949, when Mao Zedong proclaimed the official
establishment of the People's Republic of China, the aims of the
Communist Party of China were still largely unknown to the majority
of the war-weary Chinese. Now a new kind of state had emerged- a
People's Republic. People wondered with varying emotions what new
changes this would bring to their daily lives and to their country.
Zhang Da-Peng's novelistic memoir of his first four decades, Life
under Mao Zedong's Rule, is a striking and chillingly unforgettable
response to this question, for three of these decades encompassed
the entire Maoist period, that is, from 1949 to 1977, when Deng
Xiaoping assumed the helm of the Chinese state. Zhang Da-Peng was
an eight-year-old boy of a middle class family living in Shanghai
on that day in 1949. As the years passed, he, along with millions
of his compatriots, was swept up in Mao's epic experiment to
revolutionize all of Chinese life. And like countless others,
Da-Peng personally became the target of the "class struggle," as
the Communist Party undertook a never-ending cycle of absurdly
destructive political campaigns and purges of the so-called enemies
of Socialism that culminated in the Cultural Revolution and the
terrifying near-complete breakdown of Chinese society and
institutions. Written many years later in Hong Kong, Life under Mao
Zedong's Rule is both Zhang Da-Peng's dramatic and deeply
humanistic personal memoir and his impassioned call to his fellow
Chinese not to bury the memories of those terrible years in
newfound prosperity but to reform the continuing abuses of the
political system, lest tyranny recurs in China. For the general
reader this is an intensely moving portrait of the struggle to
survive the massive and ultimately disastrous national
transformation under Mao Zedong's rule.
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R398
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