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    No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison
    No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison
    No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison
    Audiobook11 hours

    No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison

    Written by Xu Hongci and Erling Hoh

    Narrated by David Shih

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Mao Zedong's labor reform camps were notoriously brutal; modeled after the Soviet gulag, their inmates were subject to backbreaking labor, malnutrition, and vindictive wardens. They were thought to be impossible to escape-but one man did.

    Xu Hongci, a young medical student, was a loyal member of the Communist Party until he fell victim to Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. After posting a criticism of the party, he spent the next fourteen years in the labor camps. Despite horrific conditions and terrible odds, Hongci was determined to escape, failing three times before he succeeded in 1972.

    Originally published in Hong Kong, Hongci's remarkable memoir recounts his life from childhood through his prison break. After discovering the book in a Hong Kong library, the journalist Erling Hoh tracked down the original manuscript and compiled this abridged translation of Hongci's memoir, which includes background on this turbulent period and an epilogue following Hongci up to his death in 2008. Almost nobody was able to escape from Mao's labor camps, but No Wall Too High tells the true story of someone who did.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 17, 2017
    ISBN9781515980612

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    Reviews for No Wall Too High

    4.5/5

    13 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A riveting adventure story and insights into life in a laogai (“labor reform”) camp, the Chinese version of the Gulag during the 1960s and 70s. It's based on a rough manuscript that had a local audience in China. The translator, Erling Hoh, found it by accident and realized its potential. This is a fantastic book. It starts slowly but keeps getting better right through to the end. It's believed Xu Hongci was the only person to successfully escape a laogai. I particularly like how it is not written for a Western audience - the translator occasionally provides notes or commentary to explain - it has an authentic feel but is accessible.
    • 5/5
      This posthumous autobiography demonstrates the horrors of extreme dictatorship and wrong-headedness. Xu Hongci began his political life as a student whose school was invited to voice their criticisms of Mao's government by creating wall posters. Once the regime realized that a gigantic can of worms had been opened, those who spoke up were subject to long prison terms in brutal work camps. Over the course of 20 years, once he finished his term of confinement, Hongci was re-categorized as a "post sentence detainee" and kept in prison for years until he escaped to Mongolia. Hongci read (until his books were confiscated and burned) the theories of Marx and Engels: "The revolutionary passion and profound ideas of these two Germans made a deep impression on me. The more I read, the more I realized the complete disjunction between our present reality (China in the late '60s) and the socialism they had propounded. Whether this chasm was due to a misunderstanding on the part of our Chinese revolutionaries or to the fact that they were actually pursuing their own brand of it is a question worth exploring. In a certain sense, Mao was right when he said, "The more books you read, that more reactionary you become." Indeed, I had read too many books." This tale also works wonderfully as an adventure story, as the reader is tuned into Hongci's inner thoughts and plans during his escape attempt and captures. It's a fascinating view of what those of us who carried around The Little Red Book didn't see and didn't know.