Author Nien Cheng, whose powerful book, Life and Death in Shanghai, remains one of the seminal literary recollections of life during China's Cultural Revolution, has died in Washington DC at the age of 94.
The book, described by the Washington Post as "a landmark in the literature of resistance and an invaluable inside account of the horrors of that murderous period in Chinese history," was first published in 1987.
It begins with the author's summons to attend a public humiliation session for a former staff member of Shell Oil Company in Shanghai, for whom Nien Cheng - the widow of a former Kuomintang diplomat - also worked. The true life account subsequently details her own arrest, imprisonment and torture, and is quite simply a haunting 'must read' for anyone interested in China's late 20th-century history.
“The keenness of her thought and expression is such that it constitutes some form of martial art," the New York Times wrote in a review.
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