Today I attended a talk entitled about "Human Rights in Mao's China". At the time I saw it, all I thought was "ok so this might pertain to the regulation of religion, so I guess I should check it out". Little did I know that the speakers were the authors of the new controversial book,
Mao: The Untold Story, which I had incidentally
just read about via an e-mail from one of my professors. How coincidental is that? The book basically makes the claim that Mao was a power-hungry tyrant of a breed worse than Hitler and Stalin. Anyhow, there was one guy in the audience who was pretty pissed off and during the Q&A he accused the authors of being very biased and the moderator of not facilitating any level of real discourse. I do agree that the moderator was not very inspiring, but I think it is hard to dismiss the book itself so easily. Maybe when I get through all my readings/midterms/papers I will find the time to read the book myself.
The authors, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (middle and left)
Today I attended a talk entitled about "Human Rights in Mao's China". At the time I saw it, all I thought was "ok so this might pertain to the regulation of religion, so I guess I should check it out". Little did I know that the speakers were the authors of the new controversial book, Mao: The Untold Story, which I had incidentally just read about via an e-mail from one of my professors. How coincidental is that? The book basically makes the claim that Mao was a power-hungry tyrant of a breed worse than Hitler and Stalin. Anyhow, there was one guy in the audience who was pretty pissed off and during the Q&A he accused the authors of being very biased and the moderator of not facilitating any level of real discourse. I do agree that the moderator was not very inspiring, but I think it is hard to dismiss the book itself so easily. Maybe when I get through all my readings/midterms/papers I will find the time to read the book myself.
The authors, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (middle and left)
No comments:
Post a Comment