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From Socialist Review, No. 178, September 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Red Azalea
Anchee Min
Gollancz £6.99
More than 20 million school leavers in towns and cities across China were forcibly deported to the countryside between 1966 and 1974 – probably the biggest mass deportation ever in history.
As the Cultural Revolution was being wound down China’s rulers feared the explosive potential of massive numbers of unemployed youth, many of whom had been active in the Red Guards. They couldn’t remove unemployment, so they removed the unemployed.
An entire generation was uprooted. Many would not see their families again for over ten years. The policy was applied from the biggest city to the smallest town. In one town of 30,000 people near Shanghai over 2,000 young people were deported in those years.
Anchee Min was one of the thousands deported from Shanghai. Her experience, though, was far from typical. After spending a short time on a nearby state farm, she was chosen to star in a propaganda film and returned to Shanghai to live in the film studio.
Her descriptions of the personal humiliations and petty bullying at the farm are by far the best bits of the book. She gives a vivid sense of the hopelessness and futility felt by those exiled to the countryside, all the more poignant when you realise that she suffered far less than the majority of exiled youth.
She was relatively fortunate both in being sent to a state farm (where regular food was guaranteed) and in being close enough to visit her family. The vast majority of exiled youth ended up hundreds of miles away from home, in poor villages where the local peasants desperately resented them as extra mouths to feed.
The descriptions of life in the film studios, by contrast, give a limited picture of the sterility of cultural life under Mao, but little more.
The book has been promoted primarily on the supposed insights it gives into forbidden love in China. Anchee Min first had a lesbian relationship with her boss at the farm, and then an affair with a supervisor at the studio.
This ought to be a fascinating subject. Under Mao all premarital sex was illegal – and people weren’t supposed to marry until their mid-20s.
Gay sex wasn’t even spoken about. Only a few years ago the Chinese government turned down an invitation to an Aids conference on the grounds that ‘Aids is a homosexual problem, and there are no homosexuals in China’.
Yet during and after the Cultural Revolution many young people turned towards intimate relationships as the only sanctuary in a world gone mad. The tension between their need for security and the risks they ran created a highly charged emotional subculture which has been described brilliantly by some modern Chinese writers. Unfortunately Anchee Min isn’t one of them. The emotional scenes in Red Azalea mostly read like Mills and Boon before they discovered sex. This may be because growing up in such a sexually repressive society robs you of a vocabulary for describing your emotional and sexual feelings, or it may just be her shortcomings as a writer.
But it makes what should be the emotional centre of her story fall curiously flat. It’s impossible to read Red Azalea and not be moved by Anchee Min’s plight, but if you’re looking for the follow up to Wild Swans this definitely isn’t it.
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Last updated on: 3 June 2020