TWO PERSPECTIVES ON CHINA

Anchee Min, Red Azalea: Life and Love in China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1993) (From the bookjacket: "Unlike anything so far [circa 1993] published in the West, Red Azalea is a blazing, erotic and often heartrending truthful portrait of growing up during China's Cultural Revolution.").

Liu Xiaobo, No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia, with a Foreword by Vaclav Havel (Cambridge, Massachusetts; & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2012) ("Third, the party has encouraged extravagance in consumerism and frivolity in culture." "Consumerism has been invigorated by a deluge of luxury goods--expensive cars and watches, sumptuous villas--and has given rise to a vapid mass culture that wraps itself in pretty veneers while it deals in illusions of prosperity. The selling of this mass culture dominates the cultural marketplace and has itself become a highly profitable enterprise. The triviality and philistinism of poplar consumer culture fits perfectly with the shrill language of official injunctions The authoritarian system actively indulges a hedonist culture in which crassness and barbarity can do as they like." Id. at 225-226.).