Wild swans - A book on China, communism, Mao and his atorcities

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China - the word brings to our mind images of sprawling industries, bustling cities cloaked in heavy smog, the great wall of China, the wondrous landscape, and finally Mao - the harbinger of change in a country that today is all set to surpass far advanced societies as the largest economy in the world. Mao is revered in China. His banner hangs proud in the ill fated Tienanmen square, famous for its killing thousands of demonstrators in 1989 in a move to show no mercy against the governments detractors.

Mao is said to be the man who turned around a country that until his helmsman ship was just an oriental outpost with wars with Japan and a lot of infighting.  He is celebrated and given credit for the success that China is today.His inspirations go far and wide - he has inspired a group of leftist extremists in India who call themselves Maosists. But there is a side of him that China's officials do not acknowledge and will not speak about. Under his iron fisted rule, there were atrocities against the common men that was horrendous and beyond what words can describe. At a time when all of these hidden truths were buried within the closed walls of China one lady set out to tell the world about life under Mao and events before and after him, how it impacted the lives of her parents and people around her. She set out to lay bare the facts of a megalomaniac who believed that the only thing that could keep him in power was constant violence, hatred and fighting among people. The book that came out was called "Wild swans"

The book starts of with the story of the authors grand mother who was forced to become a concubine to a powerful military general by her fathers will. The reason behind the fathers wish was simple - he was in the military himself and his ambitions to go up the hierarchy was to be achieved by trading her with the man who had the power to help him achieve his wishes. This part of the story talks about life in the China before communism. I couldn't help but notice the patriarchy ingrained in Chinese life and I was able to see similarities in the way women were treated in China and India. They were not expected to make decisions and had no choice. They were objects of desire and the more concubines one had, the more social status is bequeathed on him. There is a passage on how the Chinese women bound their feet and the cultural impact of it. Just reading it made me shiver, such excruciating pain they had to endure and it lasted a life time!

This part of the book describes a lot of the cultural aspects of China and how much a woman suffers because of these. The fears of a woman who is a concubine confined within a house whose "husband" comes once in a blue moon but has servants who also double up as spies to report anomalies in the woman's behavior. The fears of losing favor of these servants or of the husband's actual wife.In the course of all this she bears the generals child, a daughter. As if in respite to all the pain in the ladies life, after her "husband" passes away she marries a traditional Chinese doctor and things are different now. She is happy until the much older doctor's sons and daughter in laws from his previous marriage begin to revolt against the lady for fear of losing their share of the wealth to her and her offspring. The doctor, a very gentle man leaves the house with the authors grandmother and the daughter for a town.

This is when the communist revolution begins. A lot of fighting between the communists and the army "Kuomintang" begins and after a few eventful years communist rule begins. It started off as a peoples revolution and the intentions were genuine.like all communist regimes. People actually benefit from the equal distribution of food and the ideology encourages better treatment of women. All was rosy and it was during this rule that the second protagonist of the story emerges. The authors mother like most kids of the time became a party member and rose to great heights within the party. She married a man who also was a party member and both held high positions in the party. One of their powerful woman colleagues tries to seduce the authors father but her rejects her advances and there the problems begin.

The woman who felt spited by the rejection rises to extremely powerful positions and uses every bit of power entrusted in her to ruin their lives - this became a common practice in communist China. Officials abused power to settle personal scores. This was especially possible because Mao came into picture and the megalomaniac that he was, began to spur the masses into witch hunts for anti communist people. These anti communist people included all kinds of intellectuals, people with any connection to the Kuomintang, people who showed the lightest hint of dissent. Violence broke out and sadly the authors parents are caught up in it and the authors father being the principle driven officer mouths dissent against Mao. The family now has 5 children including the authors sister and 3 brothers. The family is split. Mao 's famous call to produce steel during the period of the "Great leap forward" begins resulting in a famine that kills millions of people. The torment that the people go through is sure to bring tears to ones eyes.

Mao's fear of losing power keeps him stoking the fire of violence and the tumultuous period of the families life begins. The mother and father are separated, the mother is held in detention and the father forced into bonded labor in the harshest part of China. The children grow with their grandmother and are ostracized.

The methodology used by Mao to instigate people and the policies he advocates to ensure his power does not wane made me wonder about how much cruelty humans are capable of. He does it so smartly that nobody even has the first thought to attribute the miseries of their life to him or the party. Foreign contact is completely off limits, no publications, no movies, no music or arts of any form. No education was allowed. Some of the rules were atrocious to say the least - for eg: normal greeting were replaced with Mao's quotations. So you go to a grocer's store and instead of "Good morning" one would say "Down with the counter revolutionists". People were sent off to rural lands to work as labourers because Mao believed that they needed to live the life of peasants. Doctors, Teachers and all other professionals were specifically targeted and exiled into harsh territories as laborers. The fear of uprising was always on Mao's mind and the most probable instigators of this would be the educated ones. And so he made education farcical without any proper syllabus or teachers. He condemned arts and history or anything traditional as bourgeois and the flock of people eager to impress him go about destroying anything of historical importance. Worse than all this he branded anything aesthetically beautiful as capitalist and therefore anything of beauty from a flower garden to a beautifully made up girl was kept in check, the garden by being destroyed and the girl by being censured in one of the widely and all to frequently held denunciation meeting.

Mao was always on the lookout for anything that might jeopardize his position.And so during his rule until his ripe 80's he denounced many of his close aides, the very ones that helped him achieve all that he had. The changing point in the life of the Chineses came after the demise of Lin Bao, Mao's closest aide and the man who oversaw the operations and administration of the Mao regime.

Mao dies and China begins to change. The authors mother goes to great lengths to get the families names clarifies in the books. In between of this the authors father goes insane for a brief period with all the denunciation meetings he is forced into and the torture he is subjected to. The authors father dies at 54 and her grand mother dies before him . With all the torture and pain and suffering the author had already begun to internally question communism.

The list of the anguishes the people of China faced cannot be boiled down into this post of mine, in fact how the author manages to pen it down with so much lucidity amazes me - such raw wounds would have opened up in her.

The book ends with the author being able to go to the UK for higher education and she becomes aware of the fact that the West had no ides of the repressed and sad life of the Chinese. With encouragement from her mother she writes the book, self admittedly as she states it herself, to let the world know the truth about life in Mao's China.

This book is a must read for the wealth of information it provides of China's cultural heritage, about the ugly side of the perfect communist ideology but why it fails all the time. It opens ones eyes to how much one man is willing to do to keep his power intact - no matter how many lives are lost and no matter how the power is protected. It is beautiful for the fact that it gives an insight into the political background in Mao ruled China through the daily lives of a normal family likes yours and mine. And the impact that a political system can have on the daily lives of a common man just makes itself extremely clear from this book.

One of the best historical books I have read in a long time!

This book is a real life version of what one man envisaged about communism much before all of this. The book is called 1984 and the author is George Orwell.