‘The Most Wanted Man in China’ and ‘The Cowshed’

A couple of years ago, in what was titled “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” China’s Communist Party banned, among other things, “historical nihilism,” by which was clearly meant writings that dwelled excessively on the party’s many disastrous past mistakes. Here we have two books, both searing eyewitness accounts of past ideological fanaticism written by eminent Chinese intellectuals, that clearly fit the description of “historical nihilism,” though, Ji Xianlin’s “The Cowshed” was actually published in China a couple of decades ago, when things were a bit looser than they are today.