Blood Red Sunset

A Memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Ma Bo (View Bio)
; Paperback: Viking Penguin, 1995.

"BLOOD RED SUNSET is a must-read for anyone who wants to know what [the] Cultural Revolution is all about. I was deeply touched by Ma Bo's story. " — Anchee Min, author of RED AZALEA

"A genuine, no-holds-barred, unadorned piece of writing...echoing the realities of contemporary China." — Liu Binyan, The New York Times Book Review

"A deceptively straight-forward story carried forward by deep currents of insight." — Washington Post

"'We were dupes of class struggle' the author says of the 1966-76 national aberration known as the Cultural Revolution, ‘made to howl at the moon like a pack of dogs.' When the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party launched the One-Smash-and-Three-Oppose Campaign in 1970, the author was a fervent Red Guard. But his best friend betrayed him and Ma Bo was denounced as an ‘active counterrevolutionary,' charged with slandering Chairman Mao and sentenced to labor reform in the quarries of Inner Mongolia. An irrepressible, pugnacious young man, Ma Bo launched a campaign to convince the authorities to reopen his case. The upshot was a period of official ostracism and personal isolation; how he managed to cope with this while suffering the tortures of unrequited love forms a major portion of this compelling memoir. In 1976 the Party unexpectedly changed the verdict on him to ‘serious political errors' and ordered his conditional release. A huge bestseller in China, this richly detailed record is told with raw narrative power." — Publishers Weekly

"[An] excellent [memoir] recalling the horrors of the Cultural Revolution." — Library Journal