Book review: No Wall Too High

Author: Xu Hongci and Erling Hoh

Reviewed by: Samantha Keogh

Review made possible by: Penguin Random House South Africa

“It was impossible.

“All of China was a prison in those days.

“Mao Zedong’s labor reform camps, known as the laogai, were notoriously brutal.

“Modeled on the Soviet Gulag, they subjected their inmates to backbreaking labor, malnutrition, and vindictive wardens.

“They were thought to be impossible to escape. But one man did.”

So starts the reader’s journey through Mao’s China with Xu Hongci, a bright young student at the Shanghai No. 1 Medical College, when he was arrested for being a counter-revolutionary.

Although he was a well-respected and loyal member of Mao’s Communist Party, Hongci’s undoing came when, in 1957, Mao made his infamous speech inviting “a hundred schools of thought [to] contend,” with an open invitation to the Chinese people to air their views of the party.

An earnest Hongci responded by posting a criticism of the party which ultimately almost led to his death on a number of occasions when he became a victim of the anti-rightist campaign, and was condemned to spend the next 14 years in the laogai.

The book, subtitled One Man’s Extraordinary Escape from Mao’s Infamous Labour Camps, tells his brutal story in graphic detail from the time of his incarceration until his escape in 1972.

The story runs chronologically and includes his memories of starvation and torture, backbreaking work and tiny isolation cells into which an inmate could be thrown for months or even years.

This is an honest and harrowing account of his days in the prison camps, as a prisoner, post-sentence detainee (once a prison sentence was complete detainees were not released but rather kept in another part of the camp since they could never be allowed to go home and continue their perceived anti-Mao rhetoric) and prisoner once more.

It was a world in which the smallest insult – perceived or real – to another prisoner or guard could see him facing additional (false) charges with no way of defending himself or hope of being found innocent.

In fact on one occasion he was found guilty of counter-revolutionary acts without ever knowing the charge or facing a trial.

Xu Hongci became one of the roughly 550 000 Chinese unjustly imprisoned after the spring of 1957.

Despite the horrific conditions and terrible odds, he was determined to escape.

He failed three times before finally succeeding, in 1972, in what was an amazing and arduous triumph.

Escaping on August 7, 1972, he walked across great areas of China and eventually, using some public transport in the later stages of his journey, crossed into Mongolia on September 11.

After two years in prison in Mongolia for entering the country illegally, he was finally released and allowed to stay in the country – a free man for the first time in 16 years.

While the treatment of prisoners and the hardships they were forced to endure is difficult to read about, this is a riveting story of perseverance and the human spirit’s need to triumph over evil.

What really put the experiences of Hongci and his countrymen into stark perspective is that historians claim Mao was responsible for the deaths of more people than Hitler and Stalin combined and, some might say, had most of them killed in a far more inhumane manner.

The original book, Chongchu laogaiying, was an oral account of Hongci’s story, as told to Shanghai journalist Hu Zhanfen, published in Hong Kong.

Discovering it in a Hong Kong library, journalist Erling Ho tracked down the original manuscript and translated it into this 2017 edition which bears Hongci’s name as co-author, despite his dying in 2008.

The two men never met.