In Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeline Thien tells the story of two families who are persecuted by political violence during China’s Cultural Revolution. In the name of equal division of resources, during the years of land reform, aristocratic families were accused of being “rightist” and tortured, killed, or sent to work in concentration camps with brutal conditions. What begins as communist China’s effort to destroy social hierarchy and create an equal society ends up creating similarly unequal social structures. Thien describes how the children of rightists and landowners are punished too—which means that rightists’ low social status can be passed down through generations, thereby creating a fundamentally unequal class system. Thien’s discussion of class and communism highlights one of the greatest hypocrisies underlying Mao’s communist China.
In the beginning of the novel, a man called Wen the Dreamer and his uncles—wealthy landowners—are taken captive by their village’s People’s Association for having more wealth than everyone else. Wen the Dreamer, his three uncles, his wife Swirl, and their young daughter Zhuli, are brought to be publicly questioned and beaten in front of their entire village. The villagers accuse the uncles of taking advantage of poor people to acquire wealth by renting them land on unfair terms. During the interrogation, the family is on a stage in front of a laughing, jeering crowd, and two of them “are kicked until they no longer move[] […] Da Ge and his wife [are] executed [and] torches [are] lit and others demand[] yet more killing.” Here, Thien draws readers’ attention to the extent to which class inequality created rage in the working class and drove them to communist revolution. The violence in this scene, however, suggests that rather than creating an equal society, the revolutionaries are more focused on persecuting and punishing oppressors. In other words, the working class seeks to create a system in which formerly wealthy people are treated as less-than, rather than equal to, everyone else.
When Zhuli is older and is living with her aunt Big Mother Knife and uncle Ba Lute in Shanghai, the Red Guard targets not just convicted rightists, but people like Zhuli: the children of convicted rightists. On her way to the Conservatory one day during the height of the Cultural Revolution, Zhuli passes a poster that reads, “If the father is a hero, so is the son! If the father is a counter-revolutionary, the son must be a son of a bitch! Dig out the children of rightists, capitalist roaders, and counter-revolutionaries.” The poster expresses the belief that those with political ideologies other than communism pass on their beliefs to their children, and that there is no way that children of political prisoners can fully correct their thinking to be integrated into a communist society. In keeping with the poster’s ideology, the Red Guard targets Zhuli for being Wen the Dreamer’s daughter, beating her in the streets one day as she waits in line for rations. Beliefs like this create a communist China in which the families of convicted rightists become a social class that is beneath the class formed by, for instance, the children of the first revolutionaries. This creates a stratified society, which goes against one of the foundational principles of communism: equality.
Thien’s complex observations about class difference before and after the arrival of communism in China demonstrate the ways in which communists failed to create a truly equal society, and instead created one in which their political allies had class privilege and their suspected political enemies suffered class oppression. This reveals the Party’s hypocrisy and, in turn, undermines its moral authority.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Class and Communism ThemeTracker
Class and Communism Quotes in Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Wen’s nose began to bleed. The man slapped him repeatedly, as if he were disciplining a child. The crowd was laughing and the laughter had a sharp, bleating sound. Two men on the stage were kicked until they no longer moved Swirl thought she must be hallucinating when the guns were drawn and Da Ge and his wife were executed.
Big Mother continued through the rooms. Now she found herself at the foot of the alcove steps. Putting aside her walking stick. She paused to offer a poem to the God of Literature because, after all, these mysterious notebooks belonged to his domain. She recited:
When the mind is exalted,
the body is lightened
and feels as if it could float in the wind.
This city is famed as a center of letters;
and all you writers coming here
prove that the name of a great land
is made by better things than wealth.
“One should be careful of the sun,” the man said, as if talking to himself. He reached out, pulled the string, and the fan started up once more. “One should learn to practice in the shade.”
The students began offering criticisms of themselves and each other, and the girl next to her, an erhu major, mocked Zhuli for favoring music in the “negative” and “pessimistic” key of E-flat minor, and continuing to play sonatas by revisionist Soviet composers, including the disgraced formalist, Prokofiev. Zhuli rebuked herself fiercely, vowed to embrace the optimism of the C and G major keys, and ended her self-criticism with, “Long live the Great Revolution to create a proletarian culture, long live the Republic, long live Chairman Mao!”
Both Kai and her cousin had unassailable class backgrounds, they were Sons of the Soil, Sons of Revolutionary Heroes, Sons of…she laughed and drank the wine.
Men whose only crime was honest criticism were digging ditches and wasting away. Meanwhile, back home, their families lived in ignominy, their kids were hounded in schools or kicked out altogether, their houses were confiscated, their possessions trashed, their wives forced to beg on the streets […]
Young people were ransacking the distribution warehouse, even pulling out the workers. Zhuli closed her eyes. “Unmask them!” “Bourgeois rats!” “Drag them out!” The shouting had a merry, dancing quality, a French pierrot two-step. “Cleanly, quickly, cut off their heads!” From where had this crowd appeared? She heard a rupture like a pane coming down to land, but it was only this electrified, heaving mass of people. Time was slipping away. Soon it would be too late. “Just shout the slogans,” the girl beside her whispered, “Quickly! They’re watching you. Oh, why are you so afraid?”
“You wrote to Chairman Mao? You ridiculous oaf of a man.”
“Our own sons denounced me,” Ba Lute said, broken. “Da Shan and Flying Bear say they want nothing to do with us. But I have faith that Chairman Mao, our Great Leader, our Saving Star, will redeem us.”
It was, and would always be, the only thing he had ever said that made her weep.
In the morning, loudspeakers cried out the same turbulent song: “The Esteemed and Great Leader of our Party, our army and the People, Comrade Mao Zedong, leader of the international proletariat, has died…” Big Mother walked the shrouded streets. […] She thought of her sister and Wen, of her lost boys and Ba Lute, the unwritten music, the desperate lives, the bitter untruths they had told themselves and passed on to their children. How every day of Sparrow’s factor life was filled with humiliations. Party cadres withheld his rations, demanded self-criticisms, scorned the way he held his head, his pencil, his hands, his silence.
For as long as she could remember, right and wrong had been represented by the Party through color. Truth and beauty, for instance, were hóng (red), while criminality and falsehood were hēi (black). Her mother was red, her father was black.
