Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness

A fine piece of scholarly work contributing to knowledge of life within Chinese penal camps. The reading is essential to students and scholars of political banishment, China’s labor reformatory, Chinese intellectuals and the Communist Party, and China studies under Mao in general.

* Choice *

Wang Ning has presented us with an extremely rich study of beidahuang, and the transparency of his deployment of sources, as well as his acknowledgement of their limits, ensures this book will remain relevant and valuable in the long term.... Given the details he has from such a range of survivors of beidahuang, Wang's book is highly relevant to broader questions of how political prisoners experienced their sentence and life after release, on transitional justice, and on trauma and memory.... The first authoritative work on the topic.

* The PRC History Review *

Ning Wang's work inspires us to rethink thought and labour reform in China as part of a larger global history that continues to evolve.

* Pacific Affairs *

Wang's exploration of political exiles in Mao's China incorporates his exhaustive research into a truly beautiful narrative, full of individual voices, that is every bit as raw and moving as Yan's novel. The careful but deeply thoughtful readings of sources—recollections from captives, cadres, and guards, supplemented by official documents—makes Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

* Historical Studies in Education *

This is a marvelously level-headed book. Until the concluding chapter, Ning Wang is restrained in describing horrors on the individual level and devastation in terms of the impact on the general society. But finally the pulling of punches ends, and we are asked to try to imagine 'the waste of human talent.'

* The China journal *

Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness turns out to be a piece of scholarship impressively grounded in a serious engagement with original materials.

* American Historical Revi