Naked Earth

About

Liu Ch'üan and Su Nan meet in the countryside, eager young volunteers in Mao's new land reform program. They believe in the revolution. They believe in justice. What they find instead is brutality barely concealed by slogans, corruption dressed as ideology, and a machinery of propaganda so effective that their own doubts begin to feel like betrayal. Eileen Chang, one of modern China's greatest writers, composed Naked Earth during her own experience of the early Mao years — and the novel carries the authority of someone who saw the machinery up close. The prose is characteristically elegant and unsentimental, documenting the erosion of idealism with the precision of a clinical report. A novel about the moment when belief meets reality — and the terrible discovery that speaking the truth has become the most dangerous act of all.