So many of the great monuments and physical achievements of East Asia have been built by the unrecorded and unrewarded labour of thousands or millions of workers. Workers were quite literally unrewarded in those states which employed corvée labour, in which men (sometimes women too but usually in different ways) were required, at spear point or similar, had to provide unpaid labour for some months every year.
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Chinese society has traditionally depended to a considerable extent upon the work of the philosopher Confucius (Gong-Zu to the Chinese). In something of a simplification of his work, Confucianism is presented as a series of relationships which govern every action an individual can perform within society and which regulate every aspect of life because Chinese, living in a heavily populated state, are constantly in interaction with other people. There are five such relationships and they cover spousal relationships, parents and children, ruler and subjects and so forth.
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There are some barriers to appreciating Chinese poetry in translation. First, the Chinese language, composed of its many thousands of characters with only a limited number of sounds, contains many more rhymes than languages based on an alphabet with letters generally does.
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Welcome back to Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department, poet, translator and above average detective. In this, the sixth episode of his career, our hero is faced with what is possibly the most difficult case to handle, his very own Mao Case. That is, a case directly to the late Chairman, the Great Steersman who holds such a powerful sway upon modern China. While the opening of the door to the outside world and the spread of capitalist production and consumption methods has led to it being possible, just about, to criticise and prosecute leading Communist party officials and their relatives, yet Mao himself remains beyond reach.
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During the height of the power of Mao Zedong, the Model Soldier Wu Dawang is posted to a duty taking domestic care of his Divisional Commander. Wu is primarily motivated by the promises he made to his father-in-law in order to secure a wife, which included obtaining promotion and a better life in the city. However, these small but worthy ambitions are forcibly set aside when Wu is seduced by the commander’s wife, Liu Lian, who is a beautiful, bored and bold woman trapped in an equally loveless marriage. The two embark on an intense relationship that enables them, albeit briefly, to cast off the intellectual and moral shackles that bind them and taste at least some measure of freedom. Clearly, this cannot last.
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In common with every other society in the world, China during the Tang Dynasty distinguished between people based on their gender and customarily placed men and their work above women and their work. To survive, therefore, in a world in which sexual liaisons were permitted for men outside marriage, large numbers of women joined the sex worker industry in one form or another.
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