Ba Ruowang | Mao Zedong’s Prisoner

The author of Mao Zedong’s Prisoner, Jean Pasqualini, is a Sino-French hybrid. He grew up in China and married a Chinese wife, but retained his French nationality. In 1957, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for “counter-revolutionary crimes.” In 1964, when China and France established diplomatic relations, he was pardoned and left China, residing in Paris ever since (teaching Chinese at the National Institute of Languages and Oriental Cultures). The author wrote this book based on his seven years of personal experience in Chinese prisons and labor camps, and what he saw and heard. This book describes the prison and labor camp life in our country from the perspective of a prisoner. The author depicts the lives and various mental states of prisoners in special circumstances with meticulous and humorous strokes. It is worth mentioning that several plots in the 1988 Academy Award-winning film “The Last Emperor” were taken from the descriptions in this book. For this reason, the film’s director, Bernardo Bertolucci, compensated the author of this book with 100,000 francs and publicly apologized.