Killing Wind

The Killing Wind: A Chinese County's Descent into Madness During the Cultural Revolution by Tan Hecheng, translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian, 464 pages

Jiang Xiaochu was a 22 year old engineering student when the Cultural Revolution began in Hunan.  As his father, a former teacher, had been censured for supposedly holding counterrevolutionary views and relegated to farm labor several years earlier, the entire Jiang family were considered suspect "black elements".  Fearing for his safety as turmoil enveloped the university, Xiaochu returned to his native town.  Ever since his father's censure, the Jiang family had devoted themselves to Mao Zedong Thought, and he believed that their conspicuous loyalty would persuade their neighbors to overlook their past.  So strong was his faith that when his father and brother were arrested, Xiaochu went to the local authorities to argue for their release.  He was arrested as well, and killed beside them.  His mother and sister were gang-raped by the executioners, but survived to tell their story to investigators - including journalist Tan Hecheng - two decades later.  Tan's original article chronicling the investigation was censored by China's Communist authorities, but became the germ for his exhaustive study, The Killing Wind, where the story of Jiang Xiaochu and his family joins the stories of nearly 5000 other victims of the Cultural Revolution in the small county of Daoxian.

Stalin is famously supposed to have said, "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."  The number of people killed in the Cultural Revolution is unknown, but almost certainly over a million, and possibly several millions.  Tan Hecheng, chronicling the violence in a single county, manages to combine the statistics with personal stories that preserve the tragic, human scale.  Unfortunately, the sheer scale and disorder of the killing wind inevitably makes the narrative difficult to follow at times.  Tan intended his report as a reckoning with history, insisting that the horrors committed cannot - must not - be forgotten, not only out of a sense of justice for the victims and survivors, but also due to a commitment to the truth.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Pacific, where many Americans increasingly regard their political opponents as irredeemable deplorables against whom violence is acceptable, Tan Hecheng's study of how what Che Guevara famously described as the "extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines" is fostered and exploited is as timely as it is powerful.