The Chinese Intellectuals

Like those who knew about the Holocaust, my colleagues in the China field and I did not speak out loudly and publicly about the persecution of intellectuals in China’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. A whole generation of Westernized intellectuals were decimated. Those who did not die of natural causes were purged or killed or committed suicide only because they were intellectuals. The institutions they helped to create—the universities, research institutes, journals, libraries, and other creative enterprises—were also decimated. The destruction of China’s cultural life may take generations to repair.

The survivors, those fortunate enough to have been imprisoned or sent to the countryside, describe their exp...