Unexpected, sudden, arbitrary destruction of everything is what the world of Shakespeare’s play and Mao’s China have in common. Nan Z. Da makes the case in an excerpt from her book The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear featured at the Literary Hub site (June 10, 2025).
Da concludes:
It’s hard to see history as it is happening….
Lear’s characters never see the horrible thing coming because they’re always reacting to being newly deprived or somehow in trouble. It all happens so quickly, and the effects are felt so slowly. It’s stupidly slow, blindingly fast. The King of France shakes his head in disbelief at the precipitousness of the turn at the beginning of the play. “It is most strange,” he remarks, that Cordelia—so good and so clearly favored—can “in this trice of time…dismantle so many folds of disfavor.” In the blink of an eye she has incurred…such hatred?
There’s a horrible play on words in the plucking of Gloucester’s eyes—I never saw it coming—a truly shocking moment in Lear that always has to be handled delicately on the stage. It’s so extreme. Gloucester did not see that coming. We did not see that coming because we do not believe people capable of such things; but, even more so, it does not seem like things had been building up to this point, though of course they had. From putting someone in the stocks to gouging out an old man’s eyes, one after the other?
In Mao’s China, too:
You didn’t see it coming…. This is because tyranny always catches you by surprise…. You could never have seen it coming, because you could never have anticipated such changes to the rules of discourse.
Making much out of nothing and making nothing out of “monumental wrongs” were among the abuses of language (of words and images) that “helped to keep the frogs in the pan.”
Mao knew how to name things. Land Reform Movement. Great Leap Forward. Cultural Revolution. Three-Years Natural Disaster. Hundred Flowers Campaign. They sound like earnest, progressive movements punctuated by a small climate disaster. At most they sound like euphemisms for bland events, a talking up of small accomplishments….
Although people labeled “reactionaries” were certainly soon against the revolution, “reactionary” itself was a terrible misnomer for most of the people who were targeted for killing, dispossession, and humiliation. Intellectuals, merchants, artists, teachers, writers, and students killed or persecuted to oblivion were themselves liberal-progressive by mid- and early-twentieth-century Chinese standards and even by today’s standards. They had fought for a uniquely Chinese but also globally inspired anti-Learian outcome for their country: an equal and fair society…. Ironically, “reactionary” became a perfect description of their predicaments. In Mao’s era they could, in fact, only ever react.
History and literature help us to see that tyranny is possible and to recognize it, prevent it, and combat it while we are still able to do more than only react.
