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Excerpted from The Montreal Gazette's review of In the Eye of the China Storm.
In 1965, upon returning to his native Canada after 15 years in China, Paul Lin drew the attention of Canadian intelligence. Investigators interviewed his friends and associates, telling them that he was an “enigma.” And so he remains in this posthumous autobiography, which is as intriguing for what is left out as for what he reveals.
Though he never says it outright, Lin was an enthusiastic Maoist. His descriptions of the China he experienced echo the propaganda that he would have composed as head of the English broadcasting division of the China Information Bureau. He heaps exorbitant praise on government functionaries – “three do the work of five and five eat the food of three” – and shrugs off the excesses of the Cultural Revolution – “China was still only a single generation away from the old exploitative society.”
He does, however, concede that he was fortunate to return to Canada before intellectuals like himself were sent to the countryside for re-education in the name of ideological purity. He settled in Montreal, teaching history and heading the Centre for East Asian Studies at McGill University, where he would remain for 17 years before retiring in 1981.
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