Unofficial Histories

Their work collected here for the first time in English, these writers vividly capture the flavor of contemporary Chinese society. Following in the footsteps of Liu Binyan, these courageous investigative journalists illuminate their countrys social and political problems with engrossing stories of poverty, homelessness, and courage in the face of repression. The writers include Su Xiaokang and Hu Pingkey figures in establishing reportage as a popular and powerful voice of dissent in China. This fascinating compendium of Chinese reportage offers a rare view of Chinese society between the 1985 Fourth Congress of the Chinese Writers Associationwhich seemed to mark a move toward more liberal policies in literature and artand the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Represented here are such key figures as Su Xiaokang and Hu Ping, whose work is collected here for the first time in English. They belong to a generationborn with the Peoples Republicthat was largely responsible for making reportage a popular and important movement in the 1980s.Though the genre has an unimpeachable communist pedigree and an embarrassing tradition of panegyric, these writers diverged from the well-worn path to follow in the footsteps of Liu Binyan, who single-handedly established a role for the reportage writer as investigative journalist and political activist.
More important, Su Xiaokang and his contemporaries questioned the faith of their predecessors in the power of individual moral exemplar to bring about reform, turning instead to a macroscopic examination of the myriad social and political problems their vast country faces. They suggested that not only leadership but structures and systems of belief needed to change.In Memorandum on Freedom, Su Xiaokang shows the persistence of old patterns of thought (whenever Chinas peasants meet with misfortune their first reaction is always to throw themselves on their knees) and old problems (punishment is not for high officials and courtesy is not for the common people). Hu Pings The Eyes of China is an account of events leading to the executions of two young women in 1977 for political crimes committed during the early 1970s; at the same time it is an exploration of the fate of the authors generation, which was shaped by the infamous Red Guards. Also included are Jia Lushengs Travels with Beggars and Mai Tianshus Emigration from Chinas West. To conduct research for his essay, Jia spent months with a group of panhandlers in the city of Jian, Shandong Province.
In turn, Mai Tianshu focuses on the demoralizing poverty to be found in the arid regions that surround Lanzhou, considering the peasantss seemingly irrational attachment to their useless land, their dependence on welfare, and the failure of family planning. 0-8133-1741-X Unofficial Histories : Chinese Reportage from the Era of Reform