Time for Telling Truth is Running Out

Conversations with Zhang Shenfu

Bibliographic Data

ID2912388
AuthorsDiana Lary (University of British Columbia, corresponding author), Vera Schwarcz
Year1993
Volume66
Issue4
Pages576
Publication date1993-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePacific Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0030-851X • E-ISSN: 1715-3379
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2760688
OpenAlexW1997584652
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Zhang Shenfu, a founder of the Chinese Communist party, participated in all the major political events in China for four decades following the Revolution of 1919. Yet Zhang had become a forgotten figure in China and the West--a victim of Mao's determined efforts to place himself at the center of China's revolution--until Vera Schwarcz began to meet with him in his home on Wang Fu Cang Lane in Beijing. Now Schwarcz brings Zhang to life through her poignant account of five years of conversations with him, a narrative that is interwoven with translations of his writings and testimony of his friends. Moving circuitously, Schwarcz reveals fragments of the often contradictory layers of Zhang's character: at once a champion of feminism and an ardent womanizer, a follower of Bertrand Russell who also admired Confucius, and a philosophically inclined political pragmatist. Schwarcz also meditates on the tension between historical events and personal memory, on the public amnesia enforced by governments and the forgetfulness of those who find rememberance too painful. Her book is not only a portrait of a remarkable personality but a corrective to received accounts and to the silences that abound in the official annals of the Chinese revolution

Archaeology · China · Zhàng · Chinese history and philosophy · Computer Science · History

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