4 ideas
Chen Mengjia, a poet and pioneering oracle-bone scholar, opposed the Communist plan to romanize Chinese script. He was labeled a Rightist in 1957, persecuted again during the Cultural Revolution, and committed suicide in 1966. Hessler reconstructs him through surviving colleagues and relatives, showing that the state erased the scholar who studied the origins of Chinese writing because he defended that writing.
The Chinese script has been in continuous use since the Shang oracle bones, and it lets later readers reach earlier texts directly. Hessler argues that this written thread gave Chinese identity a spine that survived dynastic collapse and revolutionary upheaval. He also shows the cost: the same continuity turned the script into a political object that the state repeatedly tried to reform, control, or simplify.
Hessler reads reform-era China mainly through a few former students and acquaintances, including migrants, factory workers, and the Uighur money-changer Polat, rather than through officials or policy. Following individuals over years shows how people improvise identities, change their names, and move between systems. This yields a record of change that official history leaves out, much as oracle bones preserve the Shang's everyday worries rather than its monuments.
Excavations like Sanxingdui and Anyang are not neutral recovery of the past. They are contested by local pride, national narratives of a single unbroken Chinese civilization, and developers eager to pave sites over. What gets dug up, dated, and displayed reflects current needs for legitimacy as much as ancient facts.