PositiveNPRCompelling ... The Cultural Revolution is a subject that is doubly hard to humanize: Branigan attempts to profile people shaped by a still-sensitive political disaster, and one that occurred more than four decades ago, with memories that have inevitably warped with time and self-censorship. The people she decides to profile are now well into their 60s and 70s — and some are recalcitrant subjects, preferring to forget the past rather than recount it ... Some of the profiles in the book thus feel a little thin, the key players in certain events either unwilling to share more and admit their culpability or suspiciously made unavailable at the last moment, almost certainly under state coercion. One gets the sense reading Red Memory that Branigan is racing against time as much of the public record is erased or roped off ... An exercise in attempting the impossible, of trying to reconstruct what it was like to live through and then live with one of the most brutal periods of modern Chinese history. Branigan comes closer to doing so than anyone else has in the English language.
Josh Chin and Liza Lin
RaveNPRGovernment surveillance is difficult to uncover and understand because it is by nature secretive. In the absence of concrete facts (and add a tense geopolitical relationship between the U.S. and China to boot), less knowledgeable reporters might insert hyperbole or speculation. Chin and Lin do none of that, preferring instead to use real-world examples to illustrate both the mundane and dystopian applications of China\'s surveillance might ... One of the book\'s strongest traits is its unflinching analysis of how such big data approaches are being utilized not just by China, but by governments all around the world, including in the United States ... a cautionary book. It is fairhanded in detailing the rapacious speed at which China has constructed a model of digital authoritarianism other countries are no doubt eager to learn from. Its value is in showing how such surveillance systems are only as good (or bad) as the people who build them.
Fang Fang, Trans. By Michael Berry
PositiveNPRBefore the novel coronavirus engulfed the Chinese city of Wuhan, Fang Fang was already an award-winning novelist of realist fiction. But her chronicle of the lockdown of her hometown Wuhan might be her most lasting work ... Out of necessity, her diary supersedes any kind of traditional literary work, in both content and form ... Eventually, the censors came for Fang Fang. Loyal readers took screenshots of her entries before they were deleted, or helped repost entires on various other social media channels. Unfortunately, the English translation of her diary in book form is not able to capture this multidimensionality. Wuhan Diary loses much of its engaging, real-time nature by condensing her 60 entries into a single tome. Nonetheless, it is a heroic feat of speedy translation from veteran Michael Berry ... Still, readers in the U.S. will likely find many of [Fang Fang\'s] gripes about local officials and the burden of social distancing all too relevant ... remains significant as a document of the trivial, tragic and absurd during Wuhan\'s 76 days of lockdown. Such a document is especially important now, when so much of how the coronavirus spread — and what governments across the world did or did not do to contain it — is already being contested by the U.S. and China ... an important record how Wuhan\'s people suffered and ultimately persevered, even as the state wants to erase its initial fumbles from the official record.
