independence for the island, causing fears that the Chinese would invade.
I loved to watch those post-1949 Chinese films: All the films from 1949 to the 1980s were Communist propaganda for any campaign that was running at the time. They are now known as part of China’s “Red Legacy.”
The Three Years Natural Disaster: A Chinese Communist euphemism for the greatest famine in world history, which resulted from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward policies and led to the death of some 45 million Chinese.
Politburo: The Chinese Communist Party is organized on the Leninist model created in the old Soviet Union. The twenty-five-member Politburo, short for Political Bureau, is its second-highest organization. Only the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee have more power. Both groups are announced at Party congresses held at least every five years (cf. three Party Congresses, following note). For details, see Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers, Harper, 2010.
three Party Congresses: A Communist Party congress is held every five years. The next congress is due in 2012. At these congresses, the new top level of leadership (the Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee [nine members who are the heart of Chinese rule], president and premier) is presented to the nation, having been chosen in secret by the outgoing leadership in fierce factional infighting.
Party Secretariat: The Secretariat of the Communist Party of China Central Committee is the CCP’s permanent bureaucracy. There are several secretaries and they manage the work of the Politburo and its Standing Committee.
feichengwuraook: A genuine URL, but actually a phishing site designed to harm your computer.
monsters and demons: A phrase made popular by Mao Zedong to attack specialists, scholars, and other so-called class enemies during the Cultural Revolution. On June 1, 1966, the People’s Daily published an editorial entitled “Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons.” Soon after, the Red Guards went on the rampage for victims.
1983 crackdown: During the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in late 1983 to early 1984, some factions of the Chinese Communist Party tried to stamp out the influence of Western liberal ideas and cultural practices coming into China due to the “Reforms and Openness” policies that began in 1979. It was a short-lived and largely ineffective campaign, but it did involve many public executions, often of young people, in Shanghai and other cities.
the trial of the Gang of Four: The name given to a powerful radical leftist faction of the Chinese Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution. They included Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, and Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. They were imprisoned shortly after Mao’s death in 1976 and given a show trial in 1981 that resulted in prison sentences ranging from twenty years to life, and a death sentence for Jiang Qing that was commuted to life. Jiang Qing was famously defiant at the trial, claiming with considerable correctness that she was only carrying out Chairman Mao’s orders. She committed suicide in 1991. For details, see Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, Harvard Belknap Press, 2006.
Rightist status: Under Mao Zedong’s rule in China, Communist Party members who disagreed with Mao’s policies were frequently branded as Rightists. Some seven hundred thousand or more people were so labeled during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s because they disagreed with the collectivization movement later known as the Great Leap Forward that led to Mao’s great famine. Deng Xiaoping played a prominent role in carrying out this persecution. In the 1980s, these people began to be rehabilitated, many of them posthumously.
Public Security Bureau: The PSB is the main arm of the Chinese police; they operate under the Ministry of Public Security. China also has a very powerful People’s Armed Police Force, a uniformed paramilitary group that is in charge of internal security, crowd control, crackdowns, etc. Many ad hoc groups of mercenaries, sometimes referred to as thugs, also perform similar duties in local areas.
Reforms and Openness: The current reform era in China began in 1979 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Known in China as “Reforms and Openness,” it refers to the policy of reforming China’s economy into a putatively market economy, so-called “market socialism” or “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” and opening up to the world to allow an influx of foreign investment and cultural influences.
I present the strict facts and employ reasoned arguments, and I argue exclusively from the point of view of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. This infuriates them, and they all attack me: This summarizes the activities, and their consequences for him, of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to thirteen years in prison for more or less the same things Little Xi does in this novel, only in concert with others and at a more intellectual level.
It was then that I was abducted at the railway station and taken to do slave labor in an illegal brick kiln in Shanxi Province: This part of Zhang Dou’s story is based on the 2007 Chinese slave-labor scandal, also known as the Shanxi Black Brick Kiln Incident, in which it was revealed that thousands of Chinese, children included, had been forced to work in illegal brick kilns, where they were tortured. Local Party officials were complicit in this activity.
“harmonized” off the net by the Web police: A reference to Hu Jintao’s idea that China is a “harmonious society.” It has become a verb with a satirical meaning-as here, to suppress-on the Internet.
the SS Study Group: “SS” has obvious Nazi overtones for English readers, and Wei Guo’s group certainly has fascist tendencies of the kind many older Chinese establishment intellectuals warned against in 2010. “SS” probably stands for Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, two Western thinkers from whom youthful ultranationalists derive antiliberal and statist ideas.
state tutors: An archaic term from the days of imperial rule, referring to the emperor’s tutors. Here it is used ironically to indicate the similarities between Chinese Communist Party rule and imperial rule.
the New Whampoa Academy: Whampoa, or Huangpu, is a district in Guangzhou where the Nationalist Party (KMT/Kuomintang) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military officers were trained from June 1924 to 1928, before the academy was shifted to Nanjing.
politics is the art of distinguishing between the enemy and ourselves: In Mao Zedong’s 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Mao distinguished between two social contradictions: “between the enemy and us” and “among the people.” This kind of Maoist thought is still part of the Chinese Communist Party’s thought and practice.
the politics of the ancient Confucian Gongyang School: The Gongyang Zhuan places particular emphasis on the thinking of respected rulers of the period, promoting the “One Great Unity” and “Bringing Order out of Chaos” points of view. To criticize this school of ancient thought could be seen as criticizing the Communist Party dictatorship.
appreciated by the government: in Chinese, guojia means either “the nation,” “the state,” or “the government.” China is a Communist Party state in which the Communist Party is both the government and the state.
we must identify our enemies and let our hatred rise against them: This way of thinking fits in with China’s increasingly aggressive posture, for example, in claiming the South China Sea as their “core interest” and initiating conflict with Japan (September 2010) over the Senkaku islands. This mind-set resembles that of Hitler’s Germany from 1933 to 1945-with Hitler’s goon squads and stormtroopers-and Japan’s ultranationalist bushido spirit from the 1930s to 1945.
PS: The “SS” in the SS Study Group refers to two Germans: Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, as mentioned in the note to p. 64. Strauss was Jewish and Schmitt was anti-Semitic and antiliberal.
White areas: As opposed to Communist Red areas, these were under the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government at the time.
wanted to write only about new people and new things: “new people and new things” is a Cultural Revolution phrase referring to the Maoist Communist utopian idea of remolding human nature to produce a new type of human being.
