One of the greatest escape stories
Xu Hongci, the narrator of this astonishing true story, was born in Shanghai in the Thirties and witnessed first-hand the brutal Japanese invasion of his homeland.
Galvanised by enemy atrocities, and despairing of the corruption of the Chinese Nationalist government, he secretly joined the communists and, after the triumph of Mao Zedong, became part of the first generation to experience what was supposed to be the new socialist paradise.
Xu Hongci’s big mistake was to take the regime at face value. For a brief period in the late Fifties, Chairman Mao actually invited party members to criticise the direction the country was taking.
Xu Hongci, at that time an idealistic young medical student frustrated by the gap between communist rhetoric and reality, did precisely that, and the party came down on him
like a ton of bricks.
Denounced by his friends and stripped of his party membership, he was sent to the country for political ‘re-education’, a soul-destroying cycle of savage beatings, backbreaking hard labour and shrill ideological indoctrination in a penal system consciously modelled on the hideous Soviet gulags. When Xu Hongci’s original term of six years expired, he was simply sentenced again, this time to a further 20 years. There was no chance of a reprieve, and, as he was told frequently, no chance of escaping. But that is exactly what he did, and the story of how he managed to break out of his high-security prison camp, how he was able to forge travel documents, throw off his pursuers and make his way across virtually the entire length and breadth of China before crossing the Mongolian border to safety, is one of the greatest escape stories I’ve ever read.
Xu Hongci died in 2008 at the age of 75, but his story, now translated into English for the first time by journalist Erling Hoh, will live on as a timeless testament to the resilience of the human spirit.