After reading Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a Chinese intellectual friend summed it up to me: “This is our Auschwitz.” Indeed, though what happened in the cowshed where the celebrated Indologist Ji was held was by no means exceptional (torture and violence were widespread at the time), of all the memoirs of the Cultural Revolution I have read, I cannot think of another one that offers such a devastatingly direct and detailed testimony on the physical and mental abuse an entire imprisoned intellectual community suffered.

Source: China: Surviving the Camps by Zha Jianying | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books