A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters

Between 1966 and 1978, some 20 million Chinese were exiled to the countryside-many of them because of Mao Zedong's view that China's intellectuals needed "re-education"-i.e., humbling. Among the exiles were the elderly writer and translator Yang Jiang and her husband Qian Zhongshu, one of China's most prestigious writers. Her memoir of life in the cadre schools was published with official approval, but not for wide dissemination, in 1981, and is now available in English. The book is yet another testimony to Mao's dogmatism in his later years and to the human and social catastrophe that this dogmatism inflicted on China.