“Xu Hongci is China’s Louis Zamperini, an ordinary man who simply refused to be broken. To understand the deepest source of China’s rise, read Xu Hongci’s astonishing epic, a tale of ingenuity, bravery, and, most important, unshakable determination. Xu’s chronicle, masterfully translated by Erling Hoh, is the story of modern China itself: the struggle for freedom of body and mind.”
—Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“I picked up Xu Hongci’s memoir thinking that I would read it for an hour or so a night, spread out over several days. But the book was so absorbing that I never voluntarily put it down. It is a fascinating story, simply and movingly told. This is the story of the blackest days of Mao’s rule, when the party chairman set out, unfortunately all too successfully, to turn the Chinese people viciously against themselves. The question of how ordinary people could be so cruel is one that is recurring with a vengeance in the world of today, and still defies explanation. Xu’s story must still be told so we are not allowed to forget.”
—Anne Thurston, co-author of The Private Life of Chairman Mao and The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet

“An extraordinary story by a Chinese Count of Monte Cristo who managed to escape from a Maoist labor camp after a fourteen year imprisonment; a fascinating first-person account by a survivor of the Chinese gulag. This enthralling book celebrates the triumph of human dignity over the inhuman nature of a totalitarian state. If you want to understand the essence of Maoism, read this captivating narrative filled with hair-raising details about one man’s life in Mao’s China.”
—Alexander V. Pantsov, primary author of Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life and Mao: The Real Story

“An important book: the gripping and deeply moving account of a man's lifelong struggle to reach freedom, driven by an indomitable will to survive in Mao's China."
—Xiaolu Guo, author of Once Upon a Time in the East

“I am struck by the freshness of Xu Hongci’s whole story. We have plenty of reminiscences by intellectuals and party officials in China, but it is rare to find memoirs of ordinary people. And most tend to focus on the Cultural Revolution, whereas Xu Hongci starts his account with the Second World War, giving the reader a much better sense of how the entire Maoist era evolved over time. While most memoirs tell us how the victims are eventually crushed by an unforgiving system, one of the most striking aspects of Xu’s account is his determination to gain freedom. Xu escapes again and again, his moral integrity seemingly unbroken. The manuscript has been translated very elegantly by Erling Hoh, producing a text that may flow even better than the original.”
—Frank Dikotter, author of The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976 and Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962

Xu Hongci (1933–2008), a writer from Shanghai, was branded a Rightist in 1957 and spent fourteen years in Mao Zedong’s labor reform camps. Following his escape, he lived first in Tsetserleg, Mongolia, and then in Shanghai with his wife, Sukh Oyunbileg, and their children until his death in 2008.

Erling Hoh is a writer and translator of Swedish and Chinese descent and is based in northern Sweden. A former correspondent for Archaeology and the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information, he has written about Chinese history, culture, and politics for numerous magazines, including Natural History and the Far Eastern Economic Review. His most recent publication is The True History of Tea, coauthored with Professor Victor Mair and critically acclaimed by The Guardian for combining “a real depth of knowledge with a deft stylistic and organizational touch.”