Roberta Writes – Book review: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a semi-autobiographical novella written by Dai Sijie, a Chinese French author and film maker. The book was published in 2000 in French and in English in 2001.
The book is set during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that occurred in the People’s Republic of China between 1966 and 1976. The programme was implemented by Mao Zedong after his return to the centre of power in 1966 and followed his period of self-abstention and bowing down to less radical leadership in the wake of the failed Mao-led Great Leap Forward (Second five-year plan to convert China from an agriculturally led society to a communist society through the formation of people’s communes) which resulted in the Great Chinese Famine during which an estimated 15 million to 55 million people died of starvation (1959 to 1961). The purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to preserve Chinese communism by purging any remaining aspects of capitalism and Chinese traditional culture from Chinese society.
