Jasper Becker, author of Hungry Ghosts and The Chinese, is the Beijing bureau chief of the South China Morning Post.
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Vol. 21 No. 15 · 29 July 1999
pages 26-27 | 3573 words
Business as Usual at the ‘People’s Daily’
Jasper Becker
- The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. Vol. III: The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961-66 by Roderick MacFarquhar
Oxford, 733 pp, £70.00, October 1977, ISBN 0 19 214997 0
What do we know of recent Chinese history and how do we know it? This third, massive volume of Roderick MacFarquhar’s Origins of the Cultural Revolution, the first volume of which appeared in 1974, completes what is perhaps the most ambitious effort yet undertaken to unravel why and how this great and confusing event came about. Yet even after reading the 730 pages of the final volume, I was left wondering whether the thoughts and acts of the Chinese Communist Party’s leaders have become any more knowable.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 21 · 28 October 1999
From Jonathan Mirsky
Jasper Becker, reviewing The Origins of the Cultural Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar (LRB, 29 July), tells us much about the problems of writing Chinese history but fails to acknowledge that MacFarquhar tells us a great deal, despite the obstacles. At the end of his review Becker says MacFarquhar makes it clear that 'many terrible things which came to the attention of the world during the Cultural Revolution had started long before.' Quite. But Becker fails to outline what MacFarquhar actually says and instead tells us about his own experiences in China during a period that has no relevance to MacFarquhar's subject. In his survey of the book, he simply paraphrases MacFarquhar. It is therefore puzzling to read in Becker's article that 'Chinese politics was and is impenetrable.'
Jonathan Mirsky
London W11
