China at War

The world of Red Sorghumis a world at war — not one war but many, layered upon each other like the strata of the Yellow River delta. The Japanese invasion. The civil war between Nationalists and Communists. Land reform. The anti-rightist campaigns. The Great Leap Forward famine. The Cultural Revolution. For the peasants of Gaomi, history came as a series of catastrophes, each one making the previous one seem almost bearable. Mo Yan's novel is a record of what it was like to live through all of them.

The Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945)

Japan invaded China in July 1937. The war was brutal beyond measure. The Rape of Nanking in December 1937 saw an estimated 200,000 civilians murdered. Japanese forces employed biological warfare — Unit 731 conducted experiments on living human subjects. Cities were bombed indiscriminately. In the countryside, the local population suffered occupation, requisition, and routine atrocity. The novel's central battle — the defense of the sorghum fields by Commander Yu's ragtag resistance — mirrors the national catastrophe on an intimate scale. These are not soldiers; they are farmers with homemade weapons, fighting in the only field they know.

The Chinese Civil War (1945–1949)

Japan surrendered in August 1945. The civil war between the Nationalists (Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek) and the Communists (CCP, led by Mao Zedong) resumed immediately. By 1949, the Communists had won. On October 1, Mao declared the People's Republic of China from the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing. For the peasants of Shandong, the change of regime meant different things at different moments — liberation, then uncertainty, then a new kind of terror.

Land Reform (1950–1953)

The CCP redistributed land from landlords to peasants. In theory, it was justice: the end of centuries of feudal exploitation. In practice, it was often a massacre. The designation of “landlord” became a death sentence. Struggle sessions — public denunciations — ended in beatings and executions. Thousands of landlords were killed; many were not large landowners but ordinary peasants who had accumulated a few extra fields. The novel shows the local version: the revolution that liberates the poor also destroys the family at the center of the story. Dai Fenglian, the matriarch who built the distillery, is posthumously judged — and her descendants pay the price.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957)

Mao invited intellectuals to criticize the Party — and then arrested and imprisoned those who did. The Anti-Rightist Campaign sent hundreds of thousands of teachers, writers, and scientists to labor camps. It established a pattern that would define the Mao era: the promise of reform followed by betrayal, the invitation to speak followed by punishment.

The Great Leap Forward (1958–1961)

Mao's policy to rapidly industrialize China and collectivize agriculture produced the greatest famine in human history. Approximately 30 million people died. Peasants were forced to melt their tools to produce “backyard steel.” Agricultural output collapsed. In Gaomi, the fields that had once produced sorghum stood fallow. Mo Yan, who was a child during this famine, saw people starve. The novel's narrator recounts the famine with a mixture of fury and dark humor — because what else is there? The earth that Wang Lung worshipped in The Good Earth stood silent under a sky of lies.

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)

Mao's campaign against “counter-revolutionaries” turned the country upside down. Schools closed. Red Guards — teenagers mobilized by the Chairman — paraded intellectuals through the streets in dunce caps. Families were broken. Children denounced their parents. The novel's final sections show the long aftermath: a society trying to recover from a decade of self-inflicted destruction. The narrator, who came of age in this period, looks back at his grandparents' generation — the bandits and the distillery matriarchs, the anti-Japanese resistance fighters — and wonders what has been lost.

Mao's Death and the Aftermath (1976)

Mao died in September 1976. The Cultural Revolution ended. Deng Xiaoping inaugurated economic reforms that would, over decades, lift hundreds of millions out of poverty — and transform Chinese society with a speed and violence all its own. But the novel does not end in triumph. It ends in the present, where the narrator walks through a field where sorghum used to grow and feels the absence of everything — the grandparents, the wine, the blood, the passion. Modernity has come, and something irreplaceable has gone.