Socialism is Great!: A Worker's Memoir of the New China [Hardcover]

After reading this book I felt as though I had travelled to a far off country and walked briefly in the shoes of another soul; a very moving and unique experience. Not only did it offer a window into a completely different culture, but it also educated me about the political climate of the country at the time, as well as its impact on the day to day living of normal people. I learnt also the about Chinas rich cultural heritage; brought to life beautifully through the use of metaphors and the play on language. I it found fascinating learning about the various cultural superstitions & I will now watch how I hold my chopsticks! But the most impressive element for me personally was the wonderful rainbow of emotions that were painted; I found myself openly crying at times and laughing at others; I felt deep sorrow and also fired passion. It was so encapturing and enchanting and I really felt like I merged with the characters; it was a wonderful experience. The last chapter seems to end slightly abruptly, but maybe I just want to read more, hungry to find out what happened next. But all in all it was a wonderfully balanced window into an amazingly interesting and vivacious life.

Lijia Zhang is now an internationally acclaimed journalist and writer, but began her career as a factory worker in provincial China. She has written a very funny, touching and insightful account of her youth in the 1980s. Her hopes of higher education were first dashed by her mother's decision to make her leave school to work in a factory, and then gradually realised as she took courses through the "TV University", studying first engineering and then, thankfully for us, English. The book recounts both China's transformation from the last traces of the Cultural Revolution to a market economy, and the author's own transformation from a subservient daughter and model worker to a radical protestor and budding writer. It tells us a lot about China's politics and economics in that period, but it is also very personal, food and sex being central elements in the story.

Several reviewers have observed that the one thing that is missing from the book is what happens to the author after 1989. Perhaps volume 2 will reveal it but in the meantime Lijia's website has more information about her as well as about this book.

I have met Lijia Zhang and seen her on TV. I was charmed by this account and recommend it very strongly.

It was on 13 June 2009, while hiking on the Great Wall above the hamlet of Sancha near Huairou north of Beijing, that I met Lijia Zhang. She introduced herself as `Lijia author of Socialism Is Great', and that is how I come to have heard of and read this book.

It is a very readable and interesting piece of autobiography, and its readability is largely down to the author's command of English. Normally when `perfect English' is attributed to someone whose first language is not English, there is an implication that we would still know that. Not here. If I had read Socialism Is Great knowing nothing of the author's background I could have believed that she was (somehow) a born Anglophone. In fact she had to struggle, against parental and official opposition, to learn the language, and her success in the matter suggests to me a completely exceptional talent, one she perhaps does not fully recognise in herself.

How the book's title relates to the rest of its content is quite an interesting question. The narrative starts in her impoverished family home in Nanjing, and develops through her unfulfilling early experiences as a factory worker. Obviously this is socialism Chinese-style in action, but although Lijia has plenty to say about that I would not say that her angle on it is mainly political. It's more about the inner struggles of an independent-minded spirit confined in a culture of conformity and conservatism. Towards the end of the book we come to the really political bit, but it is brief, it reads almost like a postscript, and it is tantalisingly incomplete. In 1989 Lijia led a demonstration in Nanjing in support of the rebellion in Beijing's Tienanmen Square in that year. We all know the basic story - the central government panicked and instituted a witch-hunt throughout the nation to nail sympathisers with the protests. Lijia was hauled in front of an interrogation panel, and the way she tells it at one moment she was being grilled intensively, and then with one bound she was free, or you might think so. The narrative moves on suddenly to her departure from Nanjing with her husband-to-be, a Scottish student at Oxford, and I wonder what happened in between.

What a lot of the book is about is the not particularly political issue of a young woman's early initiation into men, love and sex, and the particularly sharp series of lessons she got in the fact that the second and third of those items do not always move in lockstep with each other. Whether it is the story itself, or the way it is told, or both, I found this tale far more interesting than I normally find such stuff. It all seems completely sincere, there is no real recrimination, and there is even some delightful humour - I loved the advertisements intended to attract suitors to unmarried and ageing virgins, such as ownership of or at least access to a flush toilet. I can well understand how the iron entered into her soul after her experiences, and I notice that her marriage has not lasted, although she gives no details and indeed thanks her former husband cordially for help with this book.

The last mention of socialism is a brief aside to the effect that the communist cage has become less cramped and oppressive. This seems to be true particularly in sexual respects, that particular culture in the author's early years making the kind of presbyterian Catholicism I was brought up in seem like a public holiday in Gomorrah. I'm not really sure, and I don't greatly care, how well the book's title describes what the book turns out to be about. It all hangs together exceptionally well, it has an air of honesty and authenticity about it, and one question that Lijia did resolve for me was how she can get away with such candour - it reads as if she is no longer a citizen of the People's Republic, although she lives in Beijing these days. When I bade her farewell at Sancha on 15 June I had not really thought of reading her book, but somehow the idea grew on me, and I think I made the right life choice at least to that extent.