The Tunnel

In 1969, the Taiwanese writer Ch’en Jo-hsi (陳若曦, b.1938) moved to Nanking with her family where she took up a teaching position at Hohai University 河海大學. She later wrote a number of short stories set in the Nanjing of the Cultural Revolution era. Simon Leys would later remark that, in the 1970s, Chen was ‘the only Chinese creative writer of major stature to provide us with literary testimony on the Cultural Revolution era at the grass-roots level.’ Here we reproduce two of those stories.

We also offer an account from a leading American historian of Nanking University on the eve of the collapse of scriptural Maoism.