THERE are escape stories and then there is this.

In 1972, Xu Hongci, a Communist party member imprisoned for criticising the regime, achieved the near-impossible: he escaped from a high-security laogai, one of Mao Zedong’s’s brutal labour camps, and survived to tell the tale.

It was his last chance. Xu Hongci had been incarcerated for nearly 15 years and had made three previous escape attempts from less high security settings, which had ended in failure. Now he was a hated man. With “anti-Rightist” mania at its height and just hours before he was set to be seized by authorities at the Lijiang labour camp in preparation for execution, he made his final, most audacious prison break – and against all the odds, succeeded.

Xu Hongci’s tale is a Hollywood producer’s fantasy: food squirreled away in the hidden bottom of a toolbox; cash saved painstakingly over months from a tiny pocket money allowance sent by his mother; documents forged using print blocks carved secretly and at huge risk; homemade ladders assembled under cover of darkness. It is as riveting as an airport novel – more so, for the simple, barely credible fact of being true.

But the drama neither began nor ended with this extraordinary feat. After escaping, Xu Hongci made a hugely risky and physically demanding journey across China, much of it on foot, into exile in Mongolia, though this is hardly more extraordinary than the life he led before. Xu Hongci’s memoir of prison reveals a world where the extremes of human behaviour had become the norm. He lived in the full glare of state-sponsored lunacy, a character – one among hundreds of millions – in a grotesque and deadly pantomime orchestrated by Mao Zedong.

His story is a reminder – a timely one, perhaps – of the extent to which one man’s half-informed diktats and ordnances, and his pathological inability to brook even the slightest disagreement, plunged millions of lives into chaos and tragedy.

Born in 1933, Xu Hongci joined the Communist Party while still a teenager.

Later, while a medical student, he started to realise that the party did not share his ideals of freedom and democracy, but he kept his mouth shut until Mao’s so-called Rectification Campaign of 1957, a call for anyone with criticisms about the Communist Party to make them known. Billed as proof that Mao wanted to listen, it served instead as a way to root out “counter-revolutionaries” and was Hongci’s undoing. He made his thoughts known and was duly rounded up. His own girlfriend, Tang Ximeng, was among his accusers, a betrayal that pained him all his life. Now he was an enemy of the party.

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His first internment was in 1958 at a camp called White Grass Ridge. Inmates were ordered to work 19 hours a day; dysentery was rife. After two escape attempts he was interned at another camp, where another attempt failed. He worked in fields, down mines, as a camp doctor and in factories. He suffered near starvation, terrible oedema (water retention) caused by malnutrition and constant flea infestations; he was repeatedly put in shackles; encountered treacherous fellow prisoners; and he saw many die of starvation and fatigue. “On death’s doorstep, man can become an animal and abandon every moral principle he has established in the course of his life,” he writes. “In our prison, convicts stole like kleptomaniacs, defecated where they pleased, fought, squealed and were capable of every other hideous and despicable act.”

After serving his initial six-year sentence, he was made a post-sentence detainee – still a prisoner, but with a small salary – but when the madness of the Cultural Revolution erupted, he was rearrested, subjected to a “struggle meeting” – mass denunciation – attended by 10,000 people and sentenced to 20 more years.

And yet he survived. The sheer resilience of the man is awe-inspiring. The words of his memoir are plain, immediate, unadorned; there is precious little lament in them. They reveal Xu Hongci’s ability always to live in the present, take satisfaction in his work no matter how menial, and make connections with others everywhere he went, rather than sliding into regret and hopelessness. It is a masterclass in spiritual as well as physical survival.

The Maoist disaster is all too often reduced to a few paragraphs of horrific, incomprehensible numbers, but Xu Hongci gives it human faces. He remembers by name, character and appearance each camp commandant, student and prisoner. He never forgets the small kindnesses, such as concern from a passing peasant or encouraging words from a fellow convict. “People become evil at the enticement of others. If there hadn’t been a Mao Zedong, I’m sure there wouldn’t be lackeys like [Lijiang commandant] Li Guangrong either,” he writes. This optimism was surely instrumental to his survival.

But Xu Hongci was also lucky – lucky that he met commandants who showed mercy; lucky that he never got tuberculosis; lucky that, when Li Guangrong wanted to lock him in solitary confinement there was no cell available, leaving Xu Hongci a window of opportunity to escape. He needed both resilience and luck to survive the laogai and had he lacked either one, he would probably not have lived, instead becoming another lost soul in the seemingly bottomless pit of the Maoist tragedy.

Xu Hongci married in exile in Mongolia and had two children. After the verdict against him was finally rescinded, he brought his family back to China at last, where his third child was born. He hoped his memoir would be published in China, but it was still too radical and was instead taken up by a Hong Kong publisher. Shortly after it went into print, in 2008, Xu Hongci died of kidney cancer. This book, translated by Swedish-Chinese journalist Erling Hoh, is a fuller, richer version of the story based on the original manuscript.

It deserves to become a classic, like Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, not only for Xu Hongci’s survival against the odds, but for confronting us unsparingly with what happens when folly and intolerance meet unfettered political power.

No Wall Too High: One Man’s Extraordinary Escape from Mao’s Infamous Labour Camps Xu Hongci, translated and edited by Erling Hoh (Rider, £20)