Long Overdue Update

Sorry for the prolonged inactivity on this blog for the last month. I’ve been distracted by travels, some busy nights processing photos from those travels, and general inertia when it comes to the book. I’m going to try to rededicate myself to the work between now and our next trip in September.

I haven’t abandoned all work on the book in the past month, however. I have been continuously reading books about China in the 1940s and 1950s as background research. The book I’m currently reading, Canton Under Communism, has an interesting line that sums up the book so far pretty well (I’m halfway through it):

The capacity to conceive and pursue marvelous dreams hopelessly separated from reality had been the curse of Chinese reformers for a century. It had plagued the T’aip’ings after the Opium War; it had plagued K’ang Yu-wei at the end of the nineteenth century; it had plagued Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Tse-tung. The Chinese Communists, however, were the first to build an organization so powerful that they could mobilize the entire population in pursuit of the impossible.