The boy was poisoned by irate, dying villagers, who couldn’t get at Ding directly. The story takes places after the fact, that is, at the point where many in the village have already died, and is told by the dead son of Ding Hui, the town’s most prosperous bloodhead. But these entrepreneurs cut corners by reusing needles and other supplies, with the end result that a huge swath of the village contracted AIDS. The government collectors did have scruples concerning hygiene, but then a bunch of middlemen (“bloodheads”) step in and begin tapping the supply, even going into the fields where the peasants were toiling and siphoning off blood from them during their breaks. The government gets the bright idea that it can improve its economic picture by having its citizens sell their blood to plasma collection centers.

(Yan is his last name.) Ding Village is an impoverished hamlet in Henan province. I bring this up in relation to two novels by much-censored Chinese author Yan Lianke ( Dream of Ding Village and Serve the People) since both concern the highhanded manipulations of upper-rank party cadres of the poor and lowly, who willy-nilly and for their own benefit (or so they think) participate in the entrapping schemes of their superiors.ĭream, based on a real-life, well-documented case, is Yan’s tragic version of this scenario. In China, through mass starvation from 1958-1962, which followed the agricultural loss due to the country’s hare-brained economic program, the deaths have been recently estimated at 45 million. In the Soviet Union, with its concentration camps and executions, under Stalin reign, scholars estimate 60 million killed. The results of these two beliefs of the leadership were the same: millions dead. Mao and his associates were more optimistic, thinking the masses could do wonders, and fruitfully combine the collectivization of agriculture with the quick development of industry. Stalin didn’t trust the kulaks, didn’t trust old line Bolsheviks and didn’t trust the army. Not knowing the histories in great detail, I would say that it seems Russian communism differs from the Chinese version as pessimism differs from optimism.

Dream of ding village review