Draft:Min Tan

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"The Last Red Empire" is a newly released novel by Min Tan. The book traces the intertwined sagas of two upper-class families of friends living in Hunan Province, China whose lives are forever changed by the Communist Revolution of 1949. With ordeals and hardship imposed on them by the new Communist regime, the characters manage to survive, pursue careers, protect their families, and at the same time maintain their dignity and inner strength. The book describes heart-wrenching incidents, such as a father spending years in a Gulag-like prison, a grandmother severely beaten by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and a grandson’s perilous journey to flee China by swimming for hours across the ocean to British Hong Kong. Through such incidents and other tribulations, readers of the book will gain a glimpse into the historical events of China under Communist rule, including the failed effort of the government to industrialize the nation during the Great Leap Forward, the resulting Great Famine its people suffered, the anti-intellectual and terror-driven Cultural Revolution, the post-Mao economic reform resulting in corruption among government officials and the widespread student demonstrations protesting governmental corruption. The author was born in China in 1962 and grew up during the Cultural Revolution. She immigrated to India in 1982 where she obtained her undergraduate and graduate studies in English Literature. In 1990 she returned to China and worked as a journalist, a translator, and an editor in the English Department of "China Today," a leading Chinese magazine published in seven languages and distributed worldwide. In 1995 she immigrated to the United States. Having lived in three countries with different social systems, she had first-hand knowledge of what it was like to live under democracy and autocracy. With the world’s focus on contemporary China and its desire to become the dominant world power, the author intends to give the readers an understanding of China’s post-World War II history and come to appreciate how those events shaped China’s present-day environment. Through this book the author wants her readers to garner an awareness of the history and comprehension of the Chinese Communist Party’s threat to modern democracy while enjoying a page-turning, event-filled, dynamic story.

Plot: In the spring of 1949, right before the Chinese Communist Party took over China, Mr. and Mrs. Lee visited Mr. and Mrs. Chen in White Heron Village, a small village about 50 miles away from Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in the central southern part of China. Mr. and Mrs. Wang accompanied them during the visit. The three couples had been friends since they were young. Mr. Lee informed his old friends that he and his wife had decided to immigrate to the United States. His mentor at Standford University had obtained a position for him. If Mr. Chen and Mr. Wang would like to immigrate to the United States, he would ask his mentor to help them obtain teaching positions. Mr. Chen told Mr. Lee that he thought there was no reason for him to fear the Communists. For his whole life, he had been devoting his efforts and his money to providing education for the children in his village and neighboring villages. The Communist Party had won the Chinese Civil War and took control of the mainland of China. Land Reform followed the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Chen family’s land, farm equipment, and animals were all confiscated. Valuable artworks, jewelry, and clothes were also taken away from them. The family was left with only very few house hold item necessary to conduct daily living. Mr. Chen was paraded around the village with a dunce hat and a sign around his neck bearing derogatory names. Mr. and Mrs. Chen were force to perform farming work in the field as peasants. Their daughter, Lilly, who was 17 at this time, was allowed to continue her high school education as a “descendant of class enemy who can be reformed through education.” Lilly completed high school and moved to Changsha to attend college. Mr. and Mrs. Wang, who owned a textile manufacturing business in Changsha, offered their home to Lilly. Lilly and Rose, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Wang, both got admitted into college as medical students. After robbing landowners in rural areas, the Communist Party of China started the “Anti Five Crimes Campaign” in the early 1950s to terrorize the urban entrepreneurs, forcing them to admit to committing the “five crimes,” e.g. bribery, theft of state property, tax evasion, swindling the government by cutting corners and theft of state economic intelligence. Under constant harassment and interrogation, Mr. Wang admitted that he had taken government officials out for dinner and had sent them occasional gifts. He was willing to be punished for committing the first crime of bribery but he would not admit that he committed the other four crimes. In the mid-1950s, the Chinese Communist government forced all entrepreneurs to turn the private ownership of their businesses into “joint ownership with the state.” CCP claimed that this would be voluntary. However, after the “Anti-Five-Crimes Campaign,” entrepreneurs were terrified and willingly handed their businesses to the state to avoid further persecution. Mr. Wang received five percent of the return of his factory building and equipment for about 10 years. When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, the government stopped paying his five percent. Rose married Jian Sun. Jian’s father was a general of the Nationalist Army who surrendered to the Communist Army when the latter attached Changsha City, to avoid the death of soldiers and civilians. Soon after the CCP took over China, they arrested and killed many who had connections with the Nationalist government. General Sun was arrested and put in prison, even though he surrendered to the Communists to avoid the casualty of innocent people. In 1957, the CCP launched the “Anti-Rightist Campaign.” Those who criticized the government were labeled as rights and sent to either prison or labor camps. Rose’s husband Jian was victimized during this campaign and sent to work in White Heron Village where Mr. and Mrs. Chen lived with two of their former servants, Qiang and his wife Mei. Mao launched the Great Leap Forward Campaign, calling the whole nation to make steel in furnaces built of mud and earth, and cutting down trees for fuel. The campaign turned to be more catastrophic in rural than urban areas in China. As peasants were all engaged in the futile activity of making steel, crops were not harvested but rotted in the field. Meanwhile, local leaders tended to exaggerate the crop yield. As a result, peasants had to submit all their harvest to the state, being left with nothing to feed themselves and their families. Hence the Great Famine, caused the death of tens of millions of people. Jian and his fellow rightists started writing articles, printing them with the school printer, and circulating them in the surrounding villages. Jian’s wife Rose, Lilly and her husband Liang (son of Mr. and Mrs. Lee who had left China for the United States) also helped Jian in circulating the pamphlets in Changsha. The local police discovered that Jian and his pals were writing and circulating anti-government articles and arrested them. Jian was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The Cultural Revolution started in 1966. Jian’s mother, Mrs. Sun, was severely beaten by Red Guards, an organization consisting of college and middle school students who engaged in destroying antiques, and artworks in people’s homes and museums, vandalizing historical sites, and condemning landowners, entrepreneurs, scholars, and intellectuals, in the name of answering Mao’s call to purify socialism by destroying elements of the older feudal society. Mao died in 1976. Chinese people started to enjoy more freedom and material prosperity. In the winter of 1977, the Post-Mao Chinese Regime decided to open up college doors to middle school graduates. Leilei, the son of Jian and Rose, was 19 years old now. He had been extremely intelligent and was confident that he could get into a first-class university. He scored very high on the entrance exam and was admitted into a three-year program in a third-class college because his father was in prison and labeled an “anti-revolutionary.” During a business trip to Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province located in southern China, Leilei got acquainted with Mr. Liu, a Hong Kong businessman who had escaped to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution. Leilei decided to follow Mr. Liu’s footsteps and escape to Hong Kong. The death of his grandmother, the imprisonment of his father, and his treatment by the government injected a sense of wrongness in him. He decided to leave the land where so much atrocity and cruelty had been conducted and injustice still existed. Jian was released from prison but was without a job. Leilei encouraged his father to write about his prison life. Later Leilei gave his father’s manuscripts to Mr. Liu and asked him to bring to his uncle, his mother’s brother, in Hong Kong. Rose’s brother, Chong, was taking care of their father’s business in Hong Kong at the end of the 1940s and therefore escaped the CCP persecution. After walking in the mountains for days, followed by a nine-hour swim in the ocean, Leilei reached Hong Kong and got united with his Uncle. Mr. Yap, head of the Overseas Chinese Association in Thailand, an organization run by the Nationalist Government in Taiwan, helped to publish Jian’s book in Taiwan and took Leilei to Taiwan, where he continued his college education with a scholarship from the Nationalist Government. Later, Leilei’s parents, Jian and Rose also escaped to Hong Kong and later settled down in Taiwan with the help of Mr. Yap. When the 1989 Student’s Movement occurred, Dove, daughter of Lilly and Liang, was an English teacher at Peking University. Taotao, a childhood friend of Leilei and Dove, was actively involved in the movement. After the June 4th Massacre, Taotao was on the Government’s wanted list. Through her uncle in the United States, Dove got in touch with Leilei, who had by then settled down in Taiwan. Leilei contacted an organization in Hong Kong that specialized in rescuing Chinese students and scholars who were on the Government’s wanted list after the massacre. At Leilei’s instruction, Dove took Taotao to Dongguang, a small town in Guangdong Province, where a boat took Taotao away to Hong Kong. With the help of Michael Steinberg, a young American instructor at Peking University who had a crush on Dove, Dove got admitted into a University in the United States. The book ends with Dove getting on an airplane, flying away from the Communist prison of China to a life of freedom. </ref> Amazon, Barnes and Noble

References

Barnes and Noble, Amazon