Red in Tooth and Claw: Twenty-Six Years in Communist Chinese Prisons - Hardcover

Wu-Ming-Shih; Ning, Pu

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802114547 ISBN 13: 9780802114549

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1994

Synopsis

Han Wei T'ien, a man who spent twenty-six years in the prison camps of Communist China, recalls spending two years down a well, mass executions in the Tilan prison, and braving temperatures as low as fifty degrees below zero.

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Chinese

From Kirkus Reviews:

Noted Chinese novelist Pu Ning recounts in the first person the harrowing trials of Han Wei-tien, arrested in 1951 on charges that he spied for Chiang Kai-shek. At first Han merely seems to be going mad in prison. He begins digging in the floor of his cell with his bare hands and over a few years carves out a cavelike dwelling and takes up residence underground. After two years, near dead and with a case of sudden blindness, he is transferred to a hospital and then sent to Shanghai's Tilan Bridge Jail, the largest in Asia. His description of the strict rules there (``No tˆte-...-tˆtes and no gestures of any sort'') and the overcrowded conditions are chilling. Collective shootings take place regularly, leaving the prison courtyard awash in blood. As part of a ``Labor Correction Team'' assigned to construct a road between China and Tibet, Han Wei-tien sees many deaths and watches as other prisoners disintegrate emotionally. At one point he muses about how the opening words of the Internationale, ``Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!'' apply to his group. He also discusses the strategies taken with regard to clothing and food. This flood of information is related in a formal language that keeps readers removed from the events, but humanity breaks through when Han meets a Tibetan woman named Yelusa and falls in love. An important social document, though not consistently successful as a piece of literature. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0802114547
• ISBN 13: 9780802114549
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228