Mao's People: Sixteen Portraits of Life in Revolutionary China

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, September 1981. Trade Paperback. Near Fine. Text unmarked. Foxing to edges. Spine straight and tight with a reading crease. Light edgewear. No tears. Not from a library. No remainder mark. 278 pages.

"How do we apply Chairman Mao's Thought to get fat pigs?" Squad Leader Ho (who knew the most about pigs) replied that, according to Chairman Mao, one must investigate the problem fully from all sides, and then integrate practice and theory. Ho concluded that the reason for our skinny pigs had to be found in one of three areas: the relationship between the pigs and their natural environment (excluding man); the relationship between the cadres and the pigs; and the relationship among the pigs themselves. And so the city slickers, sent down to the countryside for political reeducation, set out to find the Thousand-Dollar Pig, much to the bemusement of the local peasants.

The sixteen stories in this collection give firsthand accounts of daily life in 1970s China that show how individuals from all parts of the country led their lives in the midst of rapid social change and political unrest. As fresh and original as the individual accounts are, common themes emerge: the sluggishness of an agrarian society in responding to modernization; the painful lack of resources in a poor and gigantic country; the constraints imposed on common people by the bureaucracy; the way in which individuals outwardly support the system and inwardly resist it; the limitations of heavy and conflicting doses of ideology in motivating individuals. But there are also recurrent motifs of economic and social progress: production rises, illiteracy declines, and socialist values have impact. A new China was emerging, though change was occurring far more slowly than its leaders had intended.