The Life and Times of Book Idiot Zhou

Zhou was determined to pass the college entrance exam, which covered history, geography, mathematics and Chinese. He studied for two months before taking the exam in December 1977. Though he did well in most subjects, he scored only 5 out of 100 in math and failed.

Zhou decided not to take the test again in July 1978. But his elder sister had other plans. One evening early that year she visited and found him reading a translated Russian novel under the wavering light of an oil lamp.

"Why aren't you studying?" she asked.

"I don't want to," Zhou replied.

His sister had brought a suitcase with her. Inside were her high school textbooks, all for Zhou. "I never burned these," she informed her little brother with a smile.

Under her watchful eye, Zhou began to cram again. This time, he aced the test. His score was the highest in the commune.

Zhou's acceptance letter from Nanjing University arrived on October 10, 1978. He packed a small canvas bag of clothes, including a blue Mao suit that had been washed so many times it was bleached white, and a padded cotton jacket he'd worn for five years. At 23, he was leaving the fields at last.

OF ALL THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, the teaching of history was the most strictly controlled and politicized. The communists imposed a crude and monolithic interpretation on China's 3,000-year written history, retelling it as a Marxist fairy tale of endless class struggle and imperialist aggression. There was no room for free-thinking Chinese history majors like Zhou. But privately Zhou opened his heart to several close friends. This country and this system are rotten, he would say, receiving nods of agreement. During one meeting of the history department's Communist Party members and prospective applicants, he let his frustration surface publicly. The secretary opened the meeting, saying the party wanted China's elite to join. One by one, the students chirped in, telling him how eager they were to join, too. Then it came time for Zhou to speak. An excellent student, Zhou had been identified early on as a good party candidate.

"I used to worship party members," Zhou recalls saying in his clear reedy voice. "But during the Cultural Revolution, I noticed that the people entering the party were all relatives of important people. I stopped worshiping them. I stopped wanting to enter the party." Silence descended on the room.

The secretary spoke up and, with perfectly twisted reasoning, offered the students a lesson laced with evasion and threats. "It's natural to have doubts," Zhou recalls him beginning, "but this doesn't necessarily have to shake our belief in Marxism."

The secretary's argument was as simple as it was warped. Look at what the Communist Party had done to China: killed 30 million people during the Great Leap Forward, ruined the lives of millions more during the Cultural Revolution. Despite these disastrous failures, it remains in power. That's proof, he said, of the party's superiority.

Zhou would always remember this argument. No matter what the party would do to China, no matter how many lives it crushed, it would always remain strong enough to rout any challenger. The Communist Party would stay in power because it would do anything to stay in power. That's an argument that Zhou believes to this day.