Glenn Reynolds quotes a post from Atlantic blogger James Fallows on a new book titled Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China, which Glenn writes “tells a story that hasn’t gotten a lot of traction in the West”, perhaps because, as Fallows notes:
Fewer and fewer people can actually remember the 1930s or 1940s, but we all feel we have a sense of what the Nazi era was like in Europe. There are so many novels, so many movies, so many memoirs, so many museums, so much accumulated lore, apart from the histories and analyses themselves. Life under Stalin is not quite as amply rendered for a world audience, but thanks to legions of Russian writers everyone has some idea.
For obvious reasons, there are far fewer public representations and reminders of daily life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Main reason: the current Chinese government is still uneasy about backwards looks at that era. Such documents as do exist, in Chinese, are less accessible to the rest of the world than are the German, French, English, Russian, etc memoirs of Word War II.
I can’t argue with that; two years ago, at the end of a post on Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s blockbuster Mao biography, I wrote:
Long before there was a History Channel, I remember when I was growing up, The World At War seemed to be on TV at least once a week, with its endless images of Hitler and the Final Solution and Olivier’s baritone narration. Similarly, the end of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s reminded us of how evil Stalin was. But how often does TV run anything on Mao? And when they do, it’s usually benign-appearing videotape of him meeting Nixon. To borrow Applebaum’s sentence about Stalin, no images means that the subject–in this case, Mao’s great famines and other horrors–in our image-driven culture, don’t really exist.
Is that trend changing? It can’t happen fast enough. Somebody alert Hollywood in the interim, though.
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