Before Mao....

My weekly posts are getting quite depressing these days...
There is a pattern to them. They all happen on Sunday night. That I guess, explains everything.

Just finished reading "Before Mao" by this guy called Patrick Lescot.

It details the history of this guy called Li Lisan. He was one of the architects of the Chinese revolution and this book details his travails in China, Russia and France.
He marries this ravishing Russian girl, has kids by her, is pilloried by the Russians and is kept in "exile" in Russia while Mao goes on with his revolution. He is thrown in the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. Only when Mao wins, is he freed and allowed to go to China. That too, only when the Chinese government asks for his release. He comes to Beijing and is made the Minister of Labour.
After a few years, when things finally start going ok, Mao thinks up his Great Leap Forward. There is a famine because Mao tries to do in two years what other countries took a century to do. Li falls out with him and is stripped of his powers.

Then the Cultural revolution happened.

Mao needs another revolution to liven up his nights. The results is thousands , nay millions of people killed, a lot of China's cultural heritage destroyed.

And seventy year old Li was pilloried publicly, his house was ransacked and his family was imprisoned in solitary confinement. I went through the gory details for two pages, before I skipped it all and went straight to the epilogue.
Li died of a broken heart caused by his public humiliation and because of his world crashing down around him. His Russian wife Lisa was kept in solitary confinement for eight years. His daughters went through it for two years and then were sent to plant rice.

Finally when Deng Xiaoping came to power, he released them all and overturned all the verdicts. Li Lisan was no longer a revisionist, semi-Trotskyist, reactionary, bourgeoisie spy. But he definitely was dead........


This book depressed me so much that I badly needed a shock therapy. This was duly administered by taking a four kilometer long walk with Green Day blaring in my ears.
As I have related in my previous posts, heavy rock music never fails to buck me up.

Billi Joe...you are God's gift.....to me!!!!