The PRC’s Original Sin

In Sparks, I wrote about Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial but at the time it hadn’t been translated into English. Now, thanks to the effort of UCLA professor Michael Berry, it has just been published by Columbia University Press. 

In this review for The Atlantic magazine, I explain why Fang’s novel is so important. The key to understanding it is that land reform is so sensitive to how the PRC writes its own history. In its telling, it was a great, necessary step that fulfilled a promise of justice to rural Chinese.

In fact, it was an incredibly (and purposefully) brutal campaign to eliminate the local landed gentry, which posed a threat to the CCP’s new authoritarian rule. On top of that, the land that farmers did get was soon taken away from them–and to this day they still cannot own land. 

Fang’s novel exposes this troubled history. Making it more significant is that Fang is not a dissident writer, but a pillar of the establishment. The book was also published by a reputable publishing house and even won a prize–until leftists attacked it. This seemed to make the government aware of how subversive the novel really was and they banned it. 

So kudos to Berry and CUP for bringing out this book in English. It sheds new light on China’s past and makes more of Fang’s works available to the English-reading public. (Besides Soft Burial, they also published The Running Flame, about a woman on death row for killing her husband. And of course readers will know Fang’s Wuhan Diary, which made her internationally famous.)

For more on land reform, please check out the China Unofficial Archives, a registered nonprofit that serves as a home for banned Chinese books, magazines, and films. The archive, where I do volunteer work, has a page on land reform with a few other works on the topic, as well as a page dedicated to Fang Fang (no bio up there yet, but we’re working on it!).