Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (Hardcover)

by Philip P. Pan (Author)
Key Phrases: state security agents, rural officials, propaganda officials, Lin Zhao, Cultural Revolution, Communist Party (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

Before she was executed in a Chinese prison in 1968, a courageous political dissident named Lin Zhao gave a tiny sailboat, folded from a cellophane candy wrapper, to her friend Zhang Yuanxun. He kept it for more than 30 years, treating it as a secret treasure. Then he passed it to Hu Jie, a documentary filmmaker, who accepted the fragile origami boat and the implicit burden it carried: the duty to preserve Lin Zhao's memory. This he did obsessively, working without pay for five years to track down people who knew her and to recover her prison writings, scratched in her own blood after the authorities had denied her ink.

Philip P. Pan tells the story of the origami sailboat in Out of Mao's Shadow, his entrancing book about the struggle "for the soul of the world's most populous nation" between a "venal party-state" and "a ragtag collection of lawyers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, hustlers, and dreamers striving to build a more tolerant, open, and democratic China." He uses the sailboat, in a quietly moving way, to help readers feel the enduring chill of Mao's ideological twists and turns, particularly the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957, when intellectuals such as Lin Zhao were encouraged to criticize the Communist Party, then cruelly punished for doing so.

Part of the book's poignancy is that Pan has joined the chain of transmission: He earned the documentary filmmaker's trust and promised to tell his story, just as the filmmaker had earned Zhang Yuanxun's trust and promised to preserve Lin Zhao's legacy of pain and endurance. Out of Mao's Shadow is a work of reporting, but it is also a work of conscience.

From 2001 to 2007, Pan was The Washington Post's bureau chief in Beijing. The 10 or so intersecting stories he tells here are gritty and real. This is not a big-theme book about the "true" China but a concrete, closely observed encounter with particular people, places and events. He puts the reader on a stool in the small shop of laid-off steel worker Yao Fuxin as Yao and some colleagues plot a doomed demonstration against corrupt local officials in the rust-belt city of Liaoyang. We run through cornfields with blind activist Chen Guangcheng as he escapes from government thugs in his home village, hoping to carry a petition for justice all the way to Beijing. Other protagonists include a land developer, an army doctor, a local party secretary, a crusading editor and a passel of feuding "rights protection" lawyers (as they call themselves). Pan seems to have been all over each incident, watching before, during and after it happened, getting long interviews with participants who initially did not want to talk, copying quotes from secret documents, hiding notes from a trial in his socks.

Yet some big truths emerge. Local government omnipotence and corruption are a toxic combination, personified in Pan's book by Zhang Xide, the party secretary of Linquan County. He presided over the violent repression of a peasant revolt against coercive birth-control methods and illegal taxes. And what is wonderfully revealing about today's China is that he was proud of his achievement! When a pair of crusading journalists named Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao exposed his actions, he sued them for defamation. (Their book, Will the Boat Sink the Water?, was published in English by PublicAffairs in 2006.) A local judge allowed something like a real trial to take place, enabling a rights protection lawyer named Pu Zhiqiang -- another vivid character -- to humiliate Zhang and his colleagues on cross-examination because of their eagerness to brag about their use of harsh methods. When the proceedings got out of control in this way, the local party authorities, who ultimately supervise all court decisions, disposed of the embarrassment by having the court issue no judgment. Zhang retired on full pension, while Chen and Wu's book remains banned.

Another theme is the alliance of the party with private entrepreneurs, represented by a richly loathsome female property developer named Chen Lihua. She specializes in acquiring land in Beijing through cronyism and forcibly evicting tenants with police assistance. Pan reports her rags to riches story, visits her lavish office and notices nine separate photos, one of her with each member of the party's top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee. Chen, too, is proud of her achievements and especially of knowing how to work the system; she reflexively offers Pan a bribe.

In contrast, Pan's heroes are fighting against the system that he calls the "largest and perhaps most successful experiment in authoritarianism in the world." That they can do so without being executed is a sign of how far China has emerged from Mao's shadow. But it is also a tribute to their courage and cunning, because, as Pan notes, the machinery of repression is "cynical, stable, and nimble." The documentary filmmaker loses his job, consumes his savings and has his films banned. The crusading newspaper editor spends a short time in jail and ends up sidelined, writing for a sports magazine. The blind activist is kidnapped, beaten and sentenced to a four-and-a-half-year prison term.

Most of these reformers and dreamers are driven by a combination of outrage and hope: outrage over the system's inhumanity and hope because it is changing. The courts, investigative journalists, independent lawyers and access for foreign journalists are all developments of the past 30 years. At the same time, Pan's stories substantiate his judgment that the party apparatus has come "to resemble an organized crime network." The system rewards corrupt, repressive local officials because they get results -- economic growth, targeted levels of population growth and social order. The party, so far, has not given officials much incentive to pay attention to environmental health, urban preservation or social justice. For now, the "struggle for China's soul" remains sadly one-sided.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
“What freedom the Chinese people now enjoy has come only because individuals have demanded and fought for it, and because the party has retreated in the face of such pressure,” Pan writes. The dream of a completely free society, however, has not yet accompanied a free marketâ€"despite the growing efforts of everyday men and women fighting the system. Through detailed and illuminating interviews with artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and peasants, Pan reveals a country filled with local government corruption, human rights violations, and collusion between the Party and the private sector. While Pan’s exposé on China left a few critics feeling hopeless, most took away a more optimistic message about China’s future. In either event, they agreed that Out of Mao’s Shadow achieves “the immediacy of first-rate reportage and the emotional depth of field of a novel” (New York Times).
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (June 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416537058
• ISBN-13: 978-1416537052
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #155,597 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fresh Look at Freedom in China, June 27, 2008

By	Nicholas MacDonald (Shanghai, China) - See all my reviews

As an American living in Shanghai, I've been impressed by the freedom that many people seem to enjoy here. Contrary to the Cultural Revolution, "RED COMMUNIST CHINA" image that many Americans have, the people of the middle classes in the huge coastal metropoli of this country live lives little different from those of their peers in the west, at least on the surface. The young people I meet scoff at the Little Red Book and the patriotic posturing of the Communist Party; they tend to be as cynical about politics as Americans, if not moreso. At the same time, however, there is a detectable current of discontent lurking below the surface.

Phillip Pan's "Out of Mao's Shadow" blows the lid off this discontent and reveals the dynamics of law and power in China's contemporary civil society. He shows a country that has left behind totalitarian ideology and control and replaced it with an elaborate system of amoral authoritarian gangsterism. Behind such catchphrases as Deng's "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics", Jiang's "Three Represents", and Hu's "Scientific Development Perspective", there's little true substance other than a massive kleptocracy's attempt to get rich quick off of exports and labor exploitation, or so Pan contends. At the same time, however, there is a growing middle class civil society- lawyers, journalists, filmmakers, bloggers, labor organizers, environmental activists, artists, and other troublemakers quietly pushing for change in a rapidly changing and increasingly liberal society. "Out of Mao's Shadow" is about what happens when the people and the party clash, told in a series of stories about these individuals, a small selection of modern China's heroes and villains:
-Zhao Ziyang, the liberal former General Secretary of the Communist Party, who spent the last 15 years of his life on house arrest after taking the blame for the Tiananmen Uprising.
-Hu Jie, a filmmaker who digs up the compelling story of a feisty Cultural Revolution martyr.
-Zeng Zhong, a chronicler of a period of history that the government would rather forget.
-Xiao Yunliang, a daring labor organizer from China's northeastern rust belt.
-Chen Lihua, China's richest woman, a wealthy land developer who made her millions through government connections and forced evictions.
-Zhang Xide, a party cadre who leads a brutal tax crackdown on an impoverished county.
-Jiang Yanyong, the courageous surgeon and PLA general who ended the government's SARS coverup- and then attempted to get them to come clean on the casualties at the Tiananmen massacre.
-Cheng Yizhong, a maverick newspaperman who starts China's freest and most provocative tabloid.
-Pu Zhiqiang, the weiquan (Right's Defense) lawyer who takes on a case against Zhang Xide- and almost wins.
-Chen Guangcheng, a blind student of medicine and law who takes on the country's forced sterilization program.

While there are many books on China hitting the shelves right now, there's only one like this. Pan combines incisive political commentary with personal profiles in a style that smacks of Peter Hessler (River Town, Oracle Bones) meets Fareed Zakaria (The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World). In between optimistic "business hype" titles and political paranoia tracts, Pan's "Shadow" is something completely different- a "boots on the ground" look at the untold stories of modern China. While there are a few places where I disagree with Pan's tone; while the CCP is undoubtably very corrupt, I would not characterize them as evil incarnate; there are many elements to their rule that are quite benevolently paternal, and, as Pan points out in several places, the country is progressively liberalizing under their administration, if at a fairly slow pace. Despite this minor critique, I give this book five stars for great writing and unique material you won't find anywhere else.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in contemporary Chinese politics and society.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book, July 28, 2008

By	sunshineyellow "sunshineyellow" (Richmond, CA United States) - See all my reviews

There are a lot of excellent books on modern China out there, but this one is a cut above. I think, as a newspaperman, Mr. Pan knows how to grab and hold his reader's attention. I was unable to put it down for a few days. He also gets very deep into the story, talking to the affected people, but also putting everything into historical context. Lastly, I'm glad this book doesn't try to shoehorn everything into some grand hypothesis about China's imminent superpower status. I was happy to learn about the general trends of public discourse and human rights since the Mao era through the stories of some particular citizens who turn out to be heroes in their own way.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant insightful truth-telling and reporting - compulsively readable!, July 3, 2008

By	Cindy Hwang (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I finished this book in two days because I couldn't bear to put it down and it was completely engaging on both intellectual and emotional levels. It's compelling, heart-breaking, compulsively readable and an incredible piece of reporting. Phillip Pan is an amazing writer/reporter and this book allows him a larger canvas to showcase his talents. But what Mr. Pan does best is that he lets others speak: he gives voice to the many individuals who have attempted to stand up to the Chinese government in order to better Chinese society. He also places this struggle in the context of Chinese history, exposing how the Chinese government's authoritarian rule is a betrayal of its original communist ideals. The stories in his book are moving and inspiring. This book is a must-read for those interested in contemporary Chinese politics and society.