Surviving Mao’s revolution, prison

BIOGRAPHY Cheng, who immigrated to Washington after she was released from the Chinese gulag and lived there until she died in 2009.

Now we can add another masterpiece to this list: “No Wall Too High: One Man’s Daring Escape From Mao’s Darkest Prison,” by Xu Hongci. Xu’s memoir, which was translated and edited from Chinese by the writer Erling Hoh, tells the story of an idealistic Communist Party member who falls afoul of the revolution when his expectations for a democratic China run headlong into Mao’s totalitarian regime. In 1957, Xu was sentenced to China’s gulag after he and a few classmates publicly criticized the Communist Party for its (at the time) slavish devotion to the Soviet Union, for holding “fake elections” with only one party-approved candidate, and for its harsh persecution of those who had hoped that Mao’s revolution meant freedom, not repression. Xu was denounced by his girlfriend and his schoolmates.

Thus begins the story of Xu’s 16-year life in the gulag. Throughout his odyssey, Xu suffered at the hands of his fellow inmates, who received extra food or a lighter workload in exchange for speaking ill of him. He was slapped into solitary confinement, beaten, made the subject of mass “struggle sessions” and threatened with execution. Xu’s journey in Mao’s gulag finally ended in 1973, when he achieved the impossible: He escaped from prison and from China, fleeing to the relative freedom of the then-People’s Republic of Mongolia. Xu’s translator, Hoh, is not wrong to claim that Xu is the only known escapee from Mao’s prisons.

What distinguishes Xu from many other Chinese memoirists is that while many of them were bystanders caught up in the events, Xu was a true believer who passionately wanted to make a contribution to his country. He joined the underground Communist Party before the 1949 revolution at the age of 15.

But, like many wellmeaning acolytes of the regime, Xu became the prey of the Communist Party, which turned on its young. To crush Xu, the party relied on those around him — first his friends and girlfriend and later his fellow inmates — to report on his inner thoughts and to implicate him in an endless series of “thought crimes,” which essentially revolved around his undying desire to be free.

What’s amazing is that throughout his 16 years in jail, Xu remained unbowed and convinced of the righteousness of his cause. He tried to escape four times, and he details each attempt and all the other dramatic events of his imprisonment with a painstaking sense of historical responsibility.

After China’s opening to the West, Xu was allowed to return to China from Mongolia. With his Mongolian wife, he settled back in his home town, Shanghai. In 2008, a version of Xu’s memoir was first published in Chinese in Hong Kong. That year, Xu died.