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Literature chronicling the cultural Revolution is rife with memoirs written by China's best and brightest — the doctors, artists and intellectuals who were sent to the countryside to toil miserably as field hands during Mao Zedong's program to "reeducate" the intelligentsia. Not all who were targets of class warfare were destroyed by it, however. Mao's Last Dancer, the latest biography set in the Cultural Revolution, tells the story of a peasant boy from northern China who was propelled to international stardom by Mao's social engineering.

Written by first-time author Li Cunxin, Dancer is a poor-boy-makes-good memoir populated by a strange cast of historical figures. Chief among them is the rabid Jiang Qing, Mao's infamous wife, who was a fierce proponent of the Great Helmsman's postulate that "There is in fact no such thing as art ... detached from or independent of politics." To Madame Mao, all presentation was propaganda; she drafted armies of performers to edify the masses through highly politicized operas and films, such as the epic revolutionary musical The East is Red. She also revived the once outlawed Beijing Dance Academy, filling dance slippers with the feet of peasant children groomed to be stalwarts of a fiercely proletarian Chinese ballet style. Among them was Li, plucked from grade school because, he surmises, he had long toes. Talent scouts dispatched to the villages believed digit size to be an important physical asset for a dancer. "For me, a peasant boy, communism truly was great," Li writes.

Li's luck allowed him to escape starvation, but ballet school during the Cultural Revolution was not all tutus and toe shoes. Beloved teachers cleaned toilets; students spent their summers toiling alongside farmers or factory workers; and more class time was devoted to the study of political movements than to dance movements. At Madame Mao's insistence, kung fu kicks and death stares were introduced to mincing ballet routines. "The dancing looked all right," she once observed during a visit to the school, "but where are the guns? Where are the grenades?"

Other historical figures play bit parts in Li's Zelig-like life story. In 1981, Li was permitted to study for a year overseas at the Houston Ballet Academy — he defected, only to be captured by Chinese diplomats who locked him in the consulate building in Houston until his release was secured by then U.S. Vice President George H.W. Bush. Li remained in the West and went on to become a principal performer for the Houston Ballet and then the Australian Ballet.

Unlike the elegant prose of novelist Anchee Min's 1994 memoir Red Azalea (Min was similarly plucked from serfdom to join Madam Mao's cultural crusade), Li's straightforward narrative rarely delves into agonizing emotional battles, nor does Li use his experiences to comment on social and political issues. Mao's Last Dancer is nonetheless a moving story, and considering the books dedicated to Cultural Revolution horrors, it's heartening to read that someone was able to dance his way through it.

• Chaim Estulin
• An unlikely hero from the Cultural Revolution tells his story