Word: peasants
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...Before he finally slipped into freedom via Hong Kong, Zhang survived for almost a year disguised as "Old Fourth Wang," a peasant farmer and fisherman in a remote border area. There, he planted rice, fished carp, hunted water deer and encountered a nation where lives remain rooted in nature and clan and authentic interactions between human beings. People knew his true identity, and didn't care. Zhang, in turn, came to admire his "kind and generous neighbors." The most remarkable passages in this memoir are those that explore this "unsanctioned" China. Part of the tragedy for Zhang and fellow exiles...
...forced to surrender its grip on Afghanistan's cities last winter, but it was never systematically disarmed. Its fighters simply scattered into the hills, returning to their villages and, in many cases, joining up with local warlords. Many of their leaders escaped capture, too, most notably the one-eyed peasant mystic Mullah Omar - who has eluded capture by the U.S. despite the widespread belief that he remains based in the mountains of his home province. And the shape of the post-Taliban order in Kabul may have paradoxically helped set the stage for a Taliban resurgence...
...fleas bit into Huang Yuefeng as he pulled the socks onto a friend's corpse, which he was preparing to bury. The young peasant didn't know at the time that the bugs had dropped from a Japanese airplane, or that his village in central China's Hunan province had fallen victim to World War II's most devastating germ warfare attack. He knew only that first the rats died, then the people died?often covered with purple splotches and lying in their own vomit. Locals called it the "rat plague." In fact it was the bubonic plague?the Black...
...most goes to Mao Zedong. The devastation wrought upon this part of the country over the past 10 years owes much to the thoughtless policies of communist China's original Chairman, who was born in a Hunan village only a few hundred kilometers from Orange Island. Convinced that Chinese peasants could stuff their granaries if they would only grow more and more rice, Mao ordered peasant communes to "plant grain everywhere." In the 1950s, work brigades flew banners reading "Turn Waste Land to Great Land" as they drained the lakes along the Yangtze and its tributaries and seeded them with...
...Those changes have brought Hu Yunxing's life full circle. Starting in 1972, when she was a 30-year-old peasant living on a commune, Hu spent years hauling sacks of earth to reclaim land as Chairman Mao had ordered. A pumping station worked day and night to lift water from her fields over a dike and into Dongting Lake. But the dike ruptured in 1996 and swept away Hu's earthen house. Her family rebuilt it in brick, which they thought would withstand anything. Then the flood that hit two years later took half of the house away again...