No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Infamous Labour Camps
When Xu Hongci arrived at the Shangai No. 1 Medical School, he was a bright and idealistic scholar and an enthusiastic Communist Party member who fully embraced Mao Zedong’s vision for reforming China for the people. When the chairman delivered his famous 1957 speech inviting different perspectives, Xu Hongci took this declaration in earnest, joining with other students to post publicly their opinions of how the party and their university could improve.
This simple act led to near-immediate condemnation. Abandoned by his friends and girlfriend and accused of being a rightist, Xu Hongci remained defiant through his humiliating public denunciation and arrest. For critiquing the party, he was sentenced to an indeterminate length of time in the country’s labor reform camps — and for the next 14 years, he toiled in the camps, suffering inhumane conditions, brutal manual labor, and starvation.
Despite the overwhelming odds and the harsh punishments he would be subjected to if caught, Xu Hongci remained determined to escape to freedom. A heartbreaking and sobering memoir, No Wall Too High is filled with horrific details and harsh truths — but also a constant thread of indomitable hope.
Quote:
“Cursing my carelessness, determined to make another escape, I inspected the cell. In front of the rammed earth wall, a row of wooden stakes had been driven into the ground to prevent prisoners from digging tunnels, but the gap between the second and third stake was large enough to squeeze my head through. “If I can get my head through, I can get my body through,” I thought. […] As soon as Ai Lun was out of the cell, using my stainless steel spoon as a tool and the blue overcoat as a cover, I dug like a marmot, hiding the earth between the planks of my bunk. At night, Ai Lun slept like a log and didn’t hear me digging. Every half hour, at the guard’s approach, I feigned sleep while he indifferently pointed his flashlight at my bunk. The rammed earth wall was thick, and after digging for three days and three nights, I still had not reached the other side. There was no going back: escape was my only option.”
Author:
Xu Hongci (1933-2008) was born in Shangai and attended medical school there before he was denounced as a rightist and spent the next fourteen years as a labor camp prisoner. In his later years, he lived and worked in Mongolia before returning to Shanghai with his family.
Editor and Translator:
Erling Hoh is a writer, translator, and editor based in Sweden, and the co-author of The True History of Tea with Victor Mair. He translated and condensed Xu Hongci’s original 572-page memoir into the shorter English version of No Wall Too High.
Published: 2017 (translation; original published 2008)
Length: 298 pages
Set in: Shanghai and Zhejiang county, China