9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
They Survived The March...but not Mao, April 19, 2010
This review is from: Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival (Hardcover)
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In 1934, Mao Zedong set on his grueling 4,000 mile trek. With him were 65,000 dedicated men and 30 indomitable women. Not camp followers nor companions, these women warriors fought alongside the men and just like the men, suffered from starvation, vermin, disease and lack of proper clothing, equipment and and basic necessities. They left behind families and children, and if they became pregnant, were forced to abandon their babies to die by the roadside.
This was the kind of strength, determination and sheer guts it took to break the chains that, for millenia, kept Chinese women at the level of slaves. Women, even of the upper classes,had no value beyond the ability to bear sons and walk gracefully on feet crippled by binding. In impoverished families, a talent for outworking the family ox was an added requirement.
These 30 women rebels were there not just to do battle with Chiang Kai Shek's armies and win the hearts and minds of the peasantry. They were also going to change the role of women in China forever. And they were willing to pay any price to succeed. So they marched alongside the men, fought alongside the men, starved with them and watched their loved ones die.
That this ragtag, shirttail army was successful is a testimony to Mao's leadership and brilliance, his military strategy and his remarkable knack for public relations and propoganda in reaching China's vast sea of ignorant, suspicious and insular peasants.
Mao was, without doubt, a charismatic genius who outmaneuvered, out-thought and outfought Chiang Kai Shek and his well-equipped, sophisticated, U.S. backed and bankrolled army. How in hell did he morph into the demented, ego-crazed Mao of later years? What transformed Mao from that brilliant young leader into a demented old man who single-handedly orchestrated famines, cultural genocide, and the death of millions of his own people?
Mao became obsessed with harebrained schemes...he diverted the entire country to a lunatic smelting project, purportedly to boost steel production. Since the raw materials were never supplied, and because failing to meet quotas was punishable by exile, farmers and factory workers melted down cooking pots to refabricate into more cooking pots. Mao conjured up the down-the-rabbit hole insanity of the Cultural Revolution, where up became down, surgeons were sent to the countryside to raise onions and peasants were sent to hospitals to perform surgery. Intellectuals were imprisoned and factory workers were making economic policy.
Still, the Cult of Mao persisted. He engendered such loyalty that his followers would literally have stepped through the gates of hell for him. And as it turned out, for the 30 women who accompanied Mao, that's pretty much were they ended up...disgraced, imprisoned, exiled, executed. After Mao took control, many of these women became powerful political leaders in their own right, some married men of power. But the victory and glory didn't last. Some were victims of the Cultural Revolution, some simply ran afoul of Jiang Qing, that spidery little power behind the throne.
30 women -- brave, cunning, driven -- today they aren't even remembered. Chinese past is malleable. It's rewritten and edited by every new regime and although I've read considerably about post-WWII China, I had only the vaguest knowledge of these women. This book gives us a little more, but I would have liked a deeper look beyond the titles they were given and the political roles they played. Where did they come from, what were their personalities? Who were their mothers and fathers and how were they raised? These are the women who created the opening that led to women's rights in today's China. In less than one generation, they changed thousands of years of laws and customs...a feat that is even more mind-boggling and remarkable than the Long March itself.
Even without better coverage of the human side of these women, this book is still essential reading for anyone whom is fascinated by Mao's long march from poet and visionary to general, world leader and madman.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant history of the Long March, May 14, 2010
This review is from: Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival (Hardcover)
Reviewed by Daniel A. Métraux
Chinese women enjoy considerable liberties today. They are educated, are free to embark on their own careers, and can marry anyone they wish -- or choose not to marry at all. Although there is evidence that many Chinese men receive preferential treatment in hiring and education, women in China have come a great distance over the past several generations. Gone are the days when the old custom of foot binding would condemn a woman, especially those from good families, to a painful life of hobbling around. A woman's status and beauty were often measured by the small size of her feet and only peasant girls who labored in the fields had normal-sized feet. The practice was outlawed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over six decades ago when they defeated the Nationalists and created the People's Republic of China.
The abolition of foot binding was one of several measures adopted by the new regime to greatly enhance the status of Chinese women. "Liberation" for most Chinese women only occurred after the success of the Revolution, but women played a major role within the CCP from its inception in the early 1920s. Their enhanced status is evident in the role that thirty women, chosen by the party, played in the historic Long March of 1934 and 1935. Their stories are portrayed in author Dean King's recent book, Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival. King portrays not only the struggle of these women to support the desperate attempt of the Chinese "Red" Army to escape Nationalist and other enemy forces, but also their former lives of servitude, poverty, arranged marriage, and bound feet. The story of these women is also the story of those women who joined the Communist crusade in the late 1920s and 1930s and who dedicated their lives to the early Communist revolution.
The story of the Long March is well known. At this time the 86,000 man Red Army, surrounded in southeastern China by perhaps as many as a million Nationalist troops, broke through enemy lines and began a 4,000 heroic march to the safety of northwestern China. Only a few thousand marchers survived the ordeal through treacherous terrain, constant attacks by Nationalist and other forces, and terrible weather. King's more focused account sees the march through the eyes of these women--a diverse group that included Ma Yixang, 11, a peasant girl sold by her family; Jin "Ah Jin" Weiying, 30, a college-educated teacher who became active in the Chinese labor movement; and Zhou "Young Orchid" Shaolan, 17, a nurse who refused to be left behind when the army tried to send her home. We see the march from their perspective-- their heroic work to nurse injured men back to health, their romantic attachments, their pregnancies and the several babies born on the march that they had to leave behind, and their later involvement in CCP politics. The women recall romantic attachments, political awakenings, and service in the army and later in Communist politics.
Dean King, who spent five years in China researching this book, visiting China, and interviewing scores of Chinese historians and march survivors, presents a fascinating view not only of the Long March itself, but also of the role of women in the early years of the Communist movement. The author offers a very graphic picture of the day-to-day hardships and struggle to survive. We see thousands of marchers die either in battle or from illness and fatigue. We meet the various, often hostile, people the marchers encountered en route. King, more than any other writer, recaptures the drama and flavor of this momentous time in Chinese history. King concludes his work by describing the lives of the heroic women who survived and who ironically lost their status as heroes during the horrors of the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unbound is a must read for any student of modern Chinese history and ranks with Red Star Over China as one of the classic narratives of the early days of the CCP.
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