China Cultural Revolution

At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, 13-year-old Nanchu watched Red Guards burst into her home and arrest her parents, whom they tortured and jailed. She was left to fend for herself and her younger brother on the streets of Shanghai, enduring poverty and near-starvation. As she grew older she herself became a Red Guard and was sent down to the largest work camp in China. There she faced primitive conditions, predatory officials, a viper's nest of party jealousies, and near-fatal injury before she finally won admittance to Madame Mao's university in Shanghai.

Bloomsbury presents The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikötter, read by Daniel York Loh. Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as 'definitive and harrowing', this is the final volume of ‘The People’s Trilogy', begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao's Great Famine. 'The seminal English language...

More than fifty years on, the Cultural Revolution's scar runs through the heart of Chinese society, and through the souls of its citizens. Stationed in Beijing for the Guardian, Tania Branigan came to realise that this brutal and turbulent decade continues to propel and shape China to this day. Yet official suppression and personal trauma have conspired in national amnesia: it exists, for the most part, as an absence.

In 1966, with the words 'Bombard the Headquarters!' Mao Zedong unleashed the full, violent force of a movement that he called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. By the time he died ten years later, millions had perished, China's cultural heritage was in ruins, its economic state was perilous, its institutions of government were damaged and its society was bitterly divided. In this fascinating account, Linda Jaivin focuses on the eventful start of the Cultural Revolution. She sheds light on the ideological quarrels that underpinned it and profiles the personalities involved.

In 1952, John T. “Jack” Downey, a 23-year-old CIA officer from Connecticut, was shot down over Manchuria during the Korean War. The pilots died in the crash, but Downey and his partner Richard “Dick” Fecteau were captured by the Chinese. For the next 20 years, they were harshly interrogated, put through show trials, held in solitary confinement, placed in reeducation camps, and toured around China as political pawns.

"I loved this book and can't stop talking about it. . . . Transcendent." —Carolyn See, The Washington Post In the tradition of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Wang Gang's English is a captivating coming-of-age novel about the power of language to launch a journey of self-discovery...

Gail Tsukiyama's A Hundred Flowers is powerful novel about an ordinary family facing extraordinary times at the start of the Chinese Cultural Revolution China, 1957. Chairman Mao has declared a new openness in society: "Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend." Many...

Bloomsbury presents The Book of Secrets by Xinran Xue, read by Daniel York Loh and Crystal Yu. ‘An extraordinary firsthand account of Communist Party machinery at its most brutal and paranoid’ --Sunday Telegraph Picked as Hilary Spurling's Book of the Year in The Spectator. The spellbinding...

Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.