Exposing the Brutality of False Benevolence

The White Deer Plain, the magnum opus of acclaimed author Chen Zhongshi, is a peculiar work in contemporary Chinese literature. His use of magical realism to document the upheavals in the countryside from the tail end of the Qing dynasty to the time Mao establishes the People's Republic reminds many of Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.