China's Daughter of the River -- a Personal Snapshot of Memoir of Marxism's betrayal in the form of Maoism Maoism is its own political animal. Maoism cannot be called synonymous with Marxism, Leninism, or even the communism as previously envisioned in the Soviet Union and the other communist nations of the past century. When one considers how communism functioned in the nation of China from the years of 1962 to 1989, as described in the prose and envisioned in the images of Hong Ying's Daughter of the River, this thesis becomes crystalline clear as the river of the title.

Ying's book is an autobiography and memoir, not a political text. It was written when the author was in her thirties although it is told form the retrospective of an eighteen-year-old. Yet Ying's narrative makes clear that the China of the author's experiences did not live up to Marxist ideals. Marxist philosophy ostensibly places the good of the collective proletariat, or workers, ahead of the individual capitalist profiteer....

In exchange, the state demands the loyalty of its workers to the state above the loyalty the individual owes to his or her family. Yet Ying, who was born during a famine during the early 1960s in China, would not have survived had her family, not the state, made a commitment to her physical survival. Although she did not understand this at the time, because of their emotional coldness to her, her family placed her physical survival at a high priority, even though she states as an adult this coldness took a considerable toll upon her emotional life, a toll she has yet to recoup even at her memoir's authorship.
The famine experienced by Ying and her family was due to the agricultural practices of Mao as well as to political and environmental conditions. The Great Famine that spanned across China during the 1960's ultimately demonstrated the limits of stapling urban Marxist philosophy to what was then still an essentially agrarian society and Chinese culture. Ying and her family at…