Storm Clouds Gathering
Publisher
:
Editions Zulma
Parution date
:
2003
EAN
:
9782843042591
Description
This autobiography represents a rare testimony on China, from the beginning of the century until the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Chen Ming was born in 1908 during the end of the reign of the emperor Pu Yi. He spent his childhood in a very poor and backwards region of north-east China where his parents were peasants. A brilliant student, he effortlessly excelled in school and became a respected professor until a series of regime changes disastrously altered the course of his life. In 1937, after studying for two years in England, Chen Ming returned to a China at war with Japan. With the rise of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in 1949, Chen Ming began a long and painful descent that lasted nearly thirty years. In 1951, he was sent to laogai, the Chinese goulag, where the living conditions were inhuman: malnutrition, filth and terror led to the death of some inmates and the suicides of others. Freed after five years he was no longer allowed to teach, so he worked as a street-sweeper. Daily monitored by parole officers, he was constantly insulted and was even forced to make his public confessions. Considered a counter-revolutionary, he then became one of the targets of the Cultural Revolution. Finally with the dead of Mao Zedong and his totalitarian regime, Chen Ming could finally live in peace, at the age of seventy.
Author
Chen Ming : The translator met the author in 1988 while she was studying in China. After this first encounter, they saw each other on a regular basis. Already planning to write his memoirs, Chen Ming made Camille Loivier promise to translate and publish them in France. The Chinese government will still not allow them to be published in China.
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