Red Fire. This item is unavailable.Red Fire

In August 1966, a 14-year-old boy in Beijing is thrust into violence and chaos as Mao Ze-dong's Cultural Revolution begins to blaze across China. In this riveting memoir, Wei Yang Chao now tells his story—how rebels attacked and publicly humiliated his family, upended his education, and sent out into a the country rendered unrecognizable by violence and radical ideology. At first he is swept up by the Red Guards but finds himself at the center of a bloody revolution. After mass rallies at Tiananmen Square, he witnesses attacks on teachers and professors, and the disintegration of his parents’ lives as tolerance and freedom begin to crumble he finds himself cast into exile. Red Fire gives readers an unprecedented account of a young survivor—a story told with real force and heartbreaking honesty.

Wei (“way”) Yang Chao was born in Guangzhou (“gwahng-joh”) in southeastern China and moved with his family to Beijing in 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. In the aftermath he worked as a translator and tour guide, speaking Mandarin, Cantonese and English. In 1981 he came to America to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received both his Master's and Ph.D. degrees. He later obtained engineering training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He pursued a career in innovative business technology, and founded one of China's "Top 100" e-Business and Internet companies, serving as Chairman/CEO for sixteen years. He now lives in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Beijing, working to promote cultural understanding and exchange between China and the United States. The author of many books and articles in Chinese on the topics of technology and culture, Red Fire is his first major publication in English and tells the story of his years during the Cultural Revolution.