On Oct 1, 1949, when Mao Zedong proclaimed the official establishment of the People's Republic of China, the aims of the Communist Party of China were still largely unknown to the majority of the war-weary Chinese. Now a new kind of state had emerged- a People's Republic. People wondered with varying emotions what new changes this would bring to their daily lives and to their country. Zhang Da-Peng's novelistic memoir of his first four decades, Life under Mao Zedong's Rule, is a striking and chillingly unforgettable response to this question, for three of these decades encompassed the entire Maoist period, that is, from 1949 to 1977, when Deng Xiaoping assumed the helm of the Chinese state. Zhang Da-Peng was an eight-year-old boy of a middle class family living in Shanghai on that day in 1949. As the years passed, he, along with millions of his compatriots, was swept up in Mao's epic experiment to revolutionize all of Chinese life. And like countless others, Da-Peng personally became the target of the "class struggle," as the Communist Party undertook a never-ending cycle of absurdly destructive political campaigns and purges of the so-called enemies of Socialism that culminated in the Cultural Revolution and the terrifying near-complete breakdown of Chinese society and institutions. Written many years later in Hong Kong, Life under Mao Zedong's Rule is both Zhang Da-Peng's dramatic and deeply humanistic personal memoir and his impassioned call to his fellow Chinese not to bury the memories of those terrible years in newfound prosperity but to reform the continuing abuses of the political system, lest tyranny recurs in China. For the general reader this is an intensely moving portrait of the struggle to survive the massive and ultimately disastrous national transformation under Mao Zedong's rule.
About the Author: Zhang Da-Peng is a successful entrepreneur, investor and versatile author in Hong Kong. He established the prestigious bi-annual literary award, the Dream of Red Chamber Prize, to honor outstanding contemporary Chinese-language novels. In addition to this work, his novel The Golden Road, was first published in Chinese in 2005 by Wenhui Publishing House and Strategies for Investment in the Stock Market by Ming Pao Publishing House, 2007. He is currently active in sharing his insights on investment strategy and on a broad range of current topics in his daily blog, dpzblog.wordpress.com, which has received over one and a half million hits to date. Born in 1941 in China's wartime capital, Chongqing, during the Sino-Japanese War, Zhang Da-Peng grew up in post-war Shanghai and graduated from the Petroleum Institute in Beijing. After Deng Xiaoping's return to power in the late 1970s, Zhang immigrated to Hong Kong where he built a highly successful business over the next several decades. Among his many personal interests, Zhang enjoys playing the ancient board game weiqi, more commonly known by its Japanese name Go, and has served as the Chairman of the Hong Kong Go Association. In 2010, the Hong Kong Baptist University conferred an Honorary Fellowship upon Zhang for his exceptional accomplishments and prodigious contributions to contemporary Chinese culture and education in Hong Kong.