Early in our lunch I ask the sinologist Li Cheng what comes to his mind when he closes his eyes and returns to the Cultural Revolution. The answer snaps back at me: “Violence.”
Li was born in 1956, the youngest of seven children in a wealthy Shanghai family — a deadly place to be during Mao’s murderous social cleansing campaign.
So it was for his eldest brother — on whom the younger children had climbed about like monkeys. The brother, the family was initially told, took his own…
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