![]() ![]() “When things are done in Mao’s spirit, it scares me,” he said, referring to China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.Īccording to her, her books are meant to add “flesh and blood” to the official party narrative and help readers empathize with the Chinese people, who have suffered under an authoritarian system. His voice dropped, barely audible over the din of cutlery and diners in the restaurant: ![]() Having lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in China’s recent history, Chen questions the aseptic version that the Communist Party has from its past and fears that it has allowed it to continue to make mistakes with global consequences. Now sitting in a restaurant in one of Hong Kong’s most opulent hotels, 93-year-old Chen says she has a warning to the world. ![]() ![]() Historians appreciate it 45 million people died over the course of five years. “It was nobody’s exaggeration, it was as true as real life, but nobody said it,” Chen said, recalling the despair and hunger caused by Mao’s experiment. But living in a village during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s disastrous attempt to catapult China into Communist abundance in the late 1950s, changed his view of what extreme hunger could lead to people doing. ![]()
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