1957 Dictionary of Victims' Names

An estimated 460,000 to 1.4 million people were persecuted in the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957-1959). The event was one of the most important political campaigns in the history of the People's Republic because it effectively silenced independent intellectual thought in the Mao era, paving the way for disasters, such as the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. 

Wu Yisan spent more than ten years researching the lives of this campaign's victims. At 33,000 entries, the list is far from complete but it gives the human perspective on the tragedy in a scope never before attempted. Among the devastating details is the story of Qian Zhongshu, one of 20th century China's best-known writers. Qian's father, Qi Jibo, had been declared a Rightist but died before he could be publicly humiliated. So Qian Zhongshu and his brother-in-law Shi Shenghuai, were forced to attend a mass rally and be criticized in his place. They did so while holding the dead man's "spirit tablet," a piece of wood used in a family shrine with the deceased name, and birth and death dates.

The dictionary was originally published as a CD-Rom. Mr. Wu has made the text version available to the China Unofficial Archive and we are now working to make it a searchable PDF for those who cannot access the CD-Rom version. The Dictionary of Names of 1957 Victims was published by the Humanities Publishing Center and funded by the Laogai Research Foundation.

 The stories behind the CCP's purge of China's educated class

Dictionary of Names of 1957 Victims

The Summer of 1957: From Hundred Schools of Thought to Two Schools of Thought

This book comprehensively records and analyzes the Anti-Rightist Campaign.

The author Zhu Zheng was born in 1931. He was once the editor of Hunan People's Publishing House and a well-known expert on Lu Xun in China. He was classified as a Rightist in 1957 and personally experienced the Anti-Rightist Campaign. This book references information from CCP party newspapers at that time, as well as his recollections, making this book informative and reliable.

The "two dueling schools of thought" in the subtitle of this book comes from The Selected Works of Mao Zedong. Mao called for one hundred schools of thought to contend but in fact only intended for two to compete: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. 

This book was first published by Henan People's Publishing House in 1998. It is one of the earliest studies of the movement in China

 A Panoramic Description of the Anti-Rightist Campaign

Summer of 1957: From One Hundred Schools of Thought to Two Schools of Thought

1959: Lhasa!

Traveling Chinese history scholar Li Jianglin began working on the Tibet issue in 2004. She has traveled to India every year in search of Tibetan refugees, visited 14 Tibetan refugee settlements in India and Nepal, contacted more than 200 exiled Tibetans from the three regions of Tibet, and personally interviewed the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, in 2008. In 2010, Li Jianglin completed her book *Lhasa 1959!* by drawing on interviews, information searches, and rare historical photographs provided by the Tibetan government in exile. Lee completed *Lhasa 1959!* in the hope of reconstructing the little-known history of the Dalai Lama's departure from Tibet in 1959. The book was published by Taiwan's Lianjing Publishing House in 2010 and reprinted in 2016.

Why Did the Dalai Lama Leave in 1959?

1966: Memories of Our Generation

This book is a collection of nineteen feature articles by well-known contemporary scholars, researchers, and writers. They recapitulate their own experiences during the Cultural Revolution in a literary style.

When the Cultural Revolution broke out, they were all young people in their twenties. These reminiscence articles are the result of a rare collective reflection after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The authors described their own experiences during the Cultural Revolution in the articles, providing a personal perspective on history.

The chief editor of this book is the philosopher and activist Xu Youyu, a former researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Xu signed and made suggestions on Charter 08, and also is a co-founder of the New Citizens Movement. Since 2015 he has resided in New York City, where he has been a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research.

This book was published by China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing Corporation in 1998.

Nineteen Scholars' Memories of the Cultural Revolution

Chronicle of the 1989 Counter-Revolutionary Rebellion in Beijing 

Published in 1989 by the Beijing Daily News, this book  is the Chinese government's official account and presentation of the June Fourth Incident. Officially, it describes the June 4 Incident as an upheaval and even stigmatizes it as a counter-revolutionary riot. Some of the  accounts presented here need to be judged against other sources.

The June Fourth Crackdown in Government Circulars

Chronicle of the 1989 Counter-Revolutionary Rebellion in Beijing    

History of the Second Half of the 20th Century Demystified  

Conundrums in the History of the Chinese Communist Party

A Chronicle of Rural Remediation of Communes in Difficult Times

Two years after the Great Famine of 1958, the government sent "rectification" work teams of about 10,000 people to many of the most severely affected provinces, such as Henan, Shandong, Anhui, Guizhou, Sichuan, Qinghai, and Xinjiang. The author of this book, Hui Wen, had just graduated from Renmin University of China and was assigned to work at the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for half a year. In December 1960, he was sent to Jianyang, Sichuan to participate in the whole society. The book records what he saw during this period. heard.

Hui Wen came into contact with a large number of farmers and witnessed the situation of rural areas on the front line. Each article in the book records the date, place and passage of writing at that time, which adds to the history and authenticity of the book. After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the author compiled these records into a volume. Through a case study of Jianyang, this book uses specific historical details to reflect the relationship between the Great Leap Forward policy and the Great Famine.

After the book was completed, due to China's strict publishing censorship system, the author did not submit it to a publishing organization and chose to circulate it among friends first. Later, he handed the manuscript to the website "China's Great Famine Archives," and this historical record was made public to the world.

A first-hand report from the front lines of the Great Famine

Chronicle of Rural Remediation of Communes in Difficult Times

A Chronicle of Western Liaoning

In 1959, in the desolate Lingyuan area in the western part of Liaoning Province,  a group of intellectual rightists from the Shenyang University arrived.  There, they were to labor and be reformed alongside criminal prisoners in the prison, while digging mines to build railroads. How did the Communist Party reform the intellectuals? What kind of encounters did these rightist intellectuals go through? Hu Jie's camera restores this history.

Northeast Past: How did the Communist Party Rehabilitate Rightist Intellectuals?

Chronicle of Western Liaoning, A

A Life of Storms : The New Life of a Disabled Prisoner

On August 8, 1966, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) adopted the "Sixteen Articles" of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, Liu Wenhui, a young mechanic in Shanghai who had been labeled as a "rightist" in 1957, wrote pamphlets and leaflets clearly opposing the Cultural Revolution, the "Sixteen Articles," authoritarianism, and tyranny. Liu was arrested on November 26 of that year. Four months later, he was executed for "counter-revolutionary crimes." Liu Wenhui became the first person known to have been publicly shot for opposing the Cultural Revolution. The author of this book, Liu Wenzhong, was Liu Wenhui's co-defendant and survived thirteen years in prison. In this autobiography, Liu Wenzhong describes in detail not only Liu Wenhui's ideology but also how he was killed by the tyrannical government.

Biography of the brother of Liu Wenhui, the first person killed in Shanghai in the fight against the Cultural Revolution

Life of Storms: The New Life of a Disabled Prisoner, A

A Non-governmental White Paper on the June Fourth Massacre

At the turn of the spring and summer of 1989, democratic protests broke out in Beijing and other cities in China. In the early hours of June 4, the Chinese government dispatched troops to suppress the movement. In 2009, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the June 4th Incident in 2009, some participants in the movement jointly released the "Unofficial White Paper on the June 4th Incident". The book has 48 pages and a large number of illustrations. 

This white paper attempts to provide a complete political background and legal analysis of the events based on reports from Chinese newspapers, radio and television stations at the time, as well as memoirs and interviews that have been published over the past 20 years. Participants in this book believe that the Chinese government has not conducted a comprehensive investigation and objective evaluation of the June 4th Incident, and has long blocked relevant information and prohibited private investigation and discussion of the matter. The report is called a "white paper" to emphasize its rigor and normative nature.

Participants in this book include Hu Ping, Yan Jiaqi, Wang Juntao, Wang Dan, Yang Jianli and others. The book was written by Li Jinjin, a doctor of law.

A civil society effort to lay out the facts of the events of June 4 1989 

NGO White Paper on the June Fourth Massacre

The AB Corps and the Tomita Incident  

In 1930, a mutiny erupted in the Red Army in the town of Futian. In the ensuring purge, more than 700 officers were executed. After this, the campaign to root out Anti-Bolshevik (AB) groups spread to various parts of China, with 70,000 executed. Occurring just nine years after the founding of the CCP, it is one of the earliest and most significant purges in the party's early history.

The first person to pay attention to the Futian Incident was Professor Dai Xiangqing of the Jiangxi Provincial Party School. Starting in late 1979, he and other colleagues went to southern Jiangxi to collect materials, conduct interviews and investigate, and found that this was an unjust and wrong case, and began to publish articles on the matter. 

In the early 1980s, Dai Xiangqing sent his article to a senior general in the PLA, Xiao Ke. After that, the research on the Futian Incident attracted the attention of senior central officials. The CCP's party history research agency sent people to Hunan and Jiangxi to investigate and collect materials. The Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China sent a review team for the Futian Incident and reported the vindication documents to the central government, but even today there is currently no official conclusion on the matter.

This book is an important study of the early history of the Communist Party of China, often mentioned by prominent independent historians, such as Yang Kuisong. As an officially recognized research project, this book does not make ideological breakthroughs, but its detailed historical materials, and its data index make it particularly valuable for understanding this historical event.

This book was published by Henan People's Publishing House in 1994.

The Red Army mutinies and is purged

AB Corps and the Futian Incident

Three Days in Wukan: Day 1

Three Days in Wukan: Day 2

Three Days in Wukan: Day 3

Wukan is a village in Luwei City, under the jurisdiction of Shanwei City, Guangdong Province. From 2011 to 2016, Wukan villagers have continued to fight to protect their land and fight for villagers' rights. Facing strong pressure from the government, some even paid with their lives. In the process, the villagers had elected their own villagers' committee by one person, one vote to practice their democratic rights. Although the protests were eventually suppressed, the impact was far-reaching. Ai Xiaoming rushed to the scene at the beginning of the Wukan incident and left this precious record.

A True Account of a Village's Struggle by the Independent Director Ai Xiaoming

Three Days in Wukan

Though I Am Gone

On August 5, 1966, Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old vice principal of the Girls High School affiliated with Beijing Normal University, was beaten to death. The murder was by some of her students, a group of female Red Guards from the school. Bian was the first educator to be killed in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. The night Bian  was killed, Deng Xiaoping's two daughters, Deng Nan and Deng Rong, found Bian's husband and told him that they could only say that Bian died of high blood pressure due to illness, but not that Bian was killed. In the end, no one was criminally prosecuted.

This film is widely regarded as one of Hu Jie's most famous for its portrayal of Bian's husband, Wang Jingyao,  and his efforts to document his wife's murder.

Follow director Hu Jie on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jiehu6613

How students at an elite high school killed one of their teachers

The Chronicle of Jiabiangou

Jiabiangou was a labor reform farm in Jiuquan County, Gansu Province, where "rightist" prisoners were held.  October 1957, nearly 3,000 educated people were detained there. In October 1961, when the higher-ups corrected the "left-leaning" mistakes of the Gansu Provincial Party Committee and began repatriating the rightist prisoners, less than half had survived. 

Writer Yang Xianhui spent five years interviewing more than a hundred people and brought to light the truth  that had been sealed for more than forty years. Originally published by Tianjin Ancient Books Publishing House in 2002, this book also includes other short and medium-sized stories by Yang Xianhui.

The Fate of Intellectuals in Labor Camps During the Great Famine

Chronicle of Jiabiangou

After the disaster in Dingxi Prefecture, which was the hardest-hit area of Gansu Province during the 1958-1960 famine, a children's welfare institution was urgently set up in Dingxi Prefecture to take in hundreds of orphans. During the same period, children's welfare centers or "kindergartens" were set up in all counties and towns in Dingxi Prefecture, as well as in the people's communes in the hardest-hit counties. These children's welfare centers, large and small, housed about 5,000 orphans. On the basis of faithful historical facts and statements by the parties concerned, this book brings tragic scenes of starvation and death before people's eyes using straightforward description, documentary language, and a down-to-earth tone of voice.

One of Yang Xianhui's Trilogy; Desperate Situation of Famine Sufferers

Chronicle of the Dingxi Orphanage

Eva: In Search of Cannibal Witnesses

This book is part of author Eva's "Famine Trilogy." Because her mother was a survivor of the famine in Gansu, Eva has obsessively pursued and recorded that tragic history. She visited a dozen counties in Gansu and Shaanxi four times and interviewed two hundred and fifty people. The list of starving victims recorded in the book is about eight hundred and thirty, while as many as one hundred and twenty-one incidents of cannibalism and cannibalistic phenomena were recorded.

Part of author Eva's Famine trilogy

In Search of Cannibal Witnesses

Eva: In Search of Holodomor Survivors

This is the first book in author Eva's "Famine Trilogy," in which she traveled to Qin'an County, Tongwei County, and Tianshui District in Gansu Province as well as to Yaozhou and Tuxian County in Shaanxi Province in 2011. She interviewed more than two hundred survivors of the Great Famine, with the oldest person being ninety-five years old and the youngest being fifty-eight years old. This book allows these lowest class, mostly uneducated peasants to speak and provide their own witness, leaving behind their voices and oral history.  Based on interviews with more than fifty interviewees, the book contains the names of more than five hundred victims and forty-nine incidents of cannibalism.

An Oral History of Famine Survivors

In Search of Famine Survivors

Eva: In Search of the Fleeing Women Dolls

This book is part of writer Eva's "Famine Trilogy." It is also the only oral history monograph on women and children who fled the famine in Gansu and Shaanxi from 1958 to 1963 as of now. More than 1.3 million people starved to death in Gansu Province, the hardest-hit area of the Great Famine, and more than 100,000 women between the ages of 16 - 15 years old fled the famine and left Gansu. What happened to them and their children is one of the most tragic memories of the Great Famine.

Women and Children in the Great Famine

In Search of the Fleeing Women and Children

Experience: My 1957

Born in 1932, He Fengming and her husband Wang Jingchao were both labeled "rightists" during their work at the Gansu Daily Newspaper.  In late April 1958, they were sent down to work at the Anxi Farm in Jiuquan. Her husband was sent to the famed Jibiangou Farm, where he died of starvation during the famine of 1960, but she survived.  In order to refuse to forget, she spent ten years writing a 400,000-dollar self-narrative, *Experience - My 1957*. The book was published by Dunhuang Literary Publishing House in 2001.

Husband and Wife Rightists, Told by a Wife Who Survived Concentration Camps

History of the 1989 Democracy Movement

This 10-volume book of 1.3 million words was written by Chen Xiaoya, a former associate researcher at the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The first edition was written in April 1994 and published in Taiwan in 1996, but with just over 200,000 words. Later, Chen Xiaoya revised the book several times to increase its content: starting from 1976, the year of Mao Zedong's death, and covering Hu Yaobang's political career as well as the background of the June Fourth Incident and also adding the contents of the memoirs of the parties involved in the June Fourth Incident. The number of words was increased to 1,360,000 words in 2016 when the book was published. The book was reprinted in 2019.

A Panoramic Record and Contextual Analysis of the 1989 Tiananmen Incident

Originally published in Hong Kong in Chinese in 2000, Gao Hua’s epic description of an early Communist Party campaign against dissent describes a pattern of thought reform and control that would hold true for decades to come. Written despite official harassment and Gao’s failing health, How the Red Sun Rose is a touchstone for China’s unofficial history movement. It was translated into English in 2019 and published by Columbia University Press. Purchase here: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/how-the-red-sun-rose/9789629968229. 

The Origin and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement, 1930–1945

How the Red Sun Rose

This landmark film by the Nanjing-based underground filmmaker Hu Jie tells the story of Lin Zhao, a top student who was imprisoned for defending students and leaders persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. She also contributed to the journal "Spark." Lin composed articles and poems from her prison cell, sometimes writing with a hairpin dipped in her own blood.

In Search of Lin Zhao's Soul

It's Like a World Apart: A Look Back at Jia Bian Gou

This book was published by Lanzhou University Press in 2004. The author, Xing Tongyi, once served as deputy director of Gansu People's Broadcasting Station and director of the Standing Committee of the Jiuquan Municipal People's Congress.

Jiabiangou Farm is a farm located on the edge of the Badain Jaran Desert in Jiuquan, Gansu Province, about 30 kilometers northeast of Jiuquan City. It became a labor camp in 1957. Before it was banned in October 1961, more than 3,000 intellectuals who were labeled as rightists were detained here. During the Great Famine, most of the intellectuals in farm labor camps died due to starvation and excessive workload. This is known as the Jiabiangou Incident. Jiabiangou has also become a symbol of the concentration camps where persecuted intellectuals were imprisoned.

Xing Tongyi was born in Tianshui, Gansu. He said that when he was young, he witnessed a neighbor named Guo being beaten as a rightist and sent to Jiabiangou Labor Camp. In 1961, he learned that this neighbor had starved to death in Jiabiangou. When he was in school at No. 1 Middle School in Tianshui City, his math teacher was Li Jinghang, a Christian who survived Jiabiangou. Xing Tongyi later served as a reporter and deputy director of Gansu Radio Station for a long time, and went to work in Jiuquan in 1996. After that, he took advantage of various opportunities to go deep into Jiabiangou and some surrounding labor reform farms. By consulting a large number of historical materials, he interviewed dozens of rightists who had undergone labor reform in Jiabiangou, or the children of these rightists. It took eight years to complete this book.

Unlike Yang Xianhui's novelistic description of Jiabiangou, Xing Tongyi's narrative is composed of interviews with the people involved and quotations from first-hand historical materials. According to Xing Tongyi, the historical materials he referred to include the Jiabiangou Farm's "Plan and Mission Statement" and the anti-rightist report of "Gansu Daily" in 1957. In addition to interviewing Jiabiangou survivors or their children, he also found information on more than 40 of the more than 2,000 rightists who were in labor camps at the time and were prosecuted by the Jiuquan County Procuratorate for resisting labor camps. After the book was published, people continued to provide him with historical materials, such as death notices and diaries of the victims.

How many labor camp inmates were there in Jiabiangou at that time? In order to clarify this issue, Xing Tongyi interviewed dozens of people, reviewed information, and also found Luo Zengfu, the production section chief of Jiabiangou Labor Camp, the only farm management cadre alive at the time. Based on the information provided by Luo Zengfu, Xing Tongyi's research concluded that there were a total of about 2,800 inmates in Jiabiangou Farm at that time, including about 2,500 rightists. This number is considered to be relatively accurate.

An official investigates China's most notorious labor camp

Worlds Away: A Look Back at Jiabiangou

Part 1: A Labor Camp for Rightists

Part 2: Youth in the Camp

Part 3: Winter in Mingshui

Part 4: Saving Lives

Part 5: Where to Rest in Peace

A five-part documentary by the filmmaker and feminist scholar Ai Xiaoming on the persecution of inmates at the Jiabiangou labor camp in Jiuquan, Gansu province, where more than 2,000 people died. The movie includes interviews with the few remaining survivors and documents efforts to commemorate the dead. The director interviewed survivors of Jiabiangou and the children of the victims and listened to their stories about the past; she also found former correctional officers and their descendants to understand the causes of labor camps and the Great Famine from different angles. 

Shot by Ai and a team of volunteers, the film presents the conflict between the preservation and destruction of memory.

Ai Xiaoming's epic documentary of a death camp

Jiabiangou Elegy: Life and Death of the Rightists

Jin Qiao Lu Man

During the three years of famine from 1959 to 1961, Tongwei's unnatural deaths due to starvation and its related factors amounted to one-third of the county's population. Mr. Zhang Dafa, who worked in Tongwei for many years and later took part in the preparation of the new Tongwei County Record. Published in 2005 through the Dingxi Writers' Association, this is a collection of his many social research reports on the Tongwei issue, "Jinqiao Luwan," which profoundly reveals the tragedy and gravity of the Great Famine, a man-made disaster, within the boundaries of a single county.

Witnessing and Recording the Great Famine in Tongwei County Gansu Province

Li Jinghang, a native of Tianshui City, Gansu Province, 1922-2016, graduated from the Mathematics Department of the Northwest Normal College in 1949. In the fall of the same year, he was employed as a mathematics teacher at Tianshui No. 1 Middle School. In 1957, he was wrongly classified as a "rightist" and sent to Jiuquan, Gansu Province to be reeducated through labor for nearly three years; in 1960, he resumed his work as a teacher at Tianshui No. 1 Middle School. In 1962, he removed his hat as a "rightist."  He was rehabilitated in 1978.  In 1980, he was transferred to Tianshui Teachers' College (which was upgraded to an undergraduate institution in 2000). After retiring in the fall of 1987, he joined the Church to serve full-time. 

In 1957, Li Jinghang was labeled a rightist and sent to Jia Bian Gou for re-education through labor.  In 1960, he was transferred to the Mingshuihe Farm in Gaotai, where the conditions were even worse, and he was subjected to a great deal of torture and abuse. The fourth chapter of his autobiography, "Chronicle of the bitter life in Jia Bian Gou," and the fifth chapter, "Chronicle of the life after returning home," are written about his bitter experience in Jia Bian Gou. From this, we can see the glory of humanity and the power of faith in the midst of suffering. This book was published by a Hong Kong Tianma Book Company Limited in 2003, with a print run of 2,000 copies, and reprinted once in 2004.

The "Last Lamb" of Jia Bian Gou, Confessions of a Christian Rightist

Journey of Grace, The

During the Great Famine in 1960, a group of  Lanzhou University  teachers and students who had been branded Rightists decided to publish the underground magazine *Spark*  to make people aware of the problems of CCP rule. Only two issues of this underground publication were printed before it was broken up as a "counter-revolutionary group case" and 43 people were arrested. 

This book is written by Xiang Chengjian, a student in the chemistry department of Lanzhou University who was caught up in the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Along with the others, he  was sent don to a labor camp in Tianshui, Gansu Province. Xiang was a major participant in creating Spark. It was Xiang and another student who were entrusted with printing the first issues of the magazine, which they did secretly while working in an old sulphuric acid plant in a suburb of Tianshui. Xiang also wrote for the magazine, including an essay called "Letter to the People," which criticized top leaders for corruption. 

Xiang was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment and was only rehabilitated in the early 1980s. This book is his autobiography, which contains a detailed description of the anti-rightist movement at Lanzhou University and the story of Spark.

Because of China's censorship system, this book has not yet been officially published, but is being prepared for publication; The PDF version will be available in  CUA in the future.

Autobiography of Mr. Xiang Chengjian, one of the founders of the underground magazine "Spark"

Return of the Soul from Purgatory

The author of this book, Ding Shu, is a Chinese scholar living in the United States. Published in 1991 by the Hong Kong-based *Nineties Magazine*, this book is the first monograph on the Great Famine in China. It has been described by some scholars as the cornerstone of the study of the Great Famine in China. The book was later updated and reprinted. The book starts from the cooperative movement and moves on to the Great Leap Forward, the Great Iron and Steel Refining, the People's Commune, the Satellite Release and the Great Communist Wind;  then, it turns to the Lushan Conference against right-leaning as well as the 7,000 People's Congress in 1962. The author collected almost all the information that could be collected at that time and summarized it to describe the situation of this great famine and its causes and consequences. The content of this book is from the website of the Chinese blog "Bianchengsuixiang" (编程随想).

The earliest published monograph on the Great Famine in China

Man-Made Disasters: The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine.

The years 1959-1961 were very unusual in the history of disasters in China and the world in the 20th century. Anyone who has experienced it will recall the starvation years and the days when people starved to death everywhere. However, due to official concealment and denial, the number of people who died in this disaster has never been officially announced. 

The purpose of Jin Hui's article is to estimate the number of unnatural deaths during the three years of the 1959-1961 disaster in China. Based on public data  released by the authoritative National Bureau of Statistics in China Jin concludes that about 40 million people died, which roughly matches studies by foreign scholars, who have estimated up to 45 million.

Using official statistics to estimate the death toll of the Great Famine.

Memorandum on "Three Years of Natural Disasters"

Memory of Lin Zhao (Documentary)

independent director Lao Hu Miao began shooting this film in 2010 and completed it in 2012, with subsequent revisions. The film features interviews with Lin Zhao's former lover Gan Cui as well as  interviews with several independent scholars such as Qian Liqun and Cui Weiping. It is a powerful addition to Lin Zhao's memory. This film was selected as one of the top 20 finalists in the 2012 Sunshine Chinese Documentary Awards.

Independent director Lao Hu Miao's search for Lin Zhao's past

Memory of Lin Zhao

Oral Interviews with Global Feminists (Ai Xiaoming Chapter)

As one of China's foremost feminist activists and thinkers, Ai was interviewed by the Global Feminisms Project at the University of Michigan. In this interview, Ai talks about her upbringing as well as about the current state of feminism in China and its outlook.

Interviews with Ai Xiaoming, a Chinese feminist advocate and activist

Oral Interviews with Global Feminists

Peasant resistance in the years of the Great Famine

Even today in China, some people have been trying to deny that there was a great famine in 1960. One of the reasons is: If there was a great famine, why did we not see the peasants' resistance? It is true that historically, in the event of a famine, peasants would loot grain, riot, and even break out in revolt in order to survive, but during the period 1958-1962, due to the special historical conditions, it seems that there is no record of peasants' resistance. But this was not the case. This article collects facts to prove the existence of peasant resistance.

Repressed Resistance

South side Street

South side Street near Tiananmen Square in Beijing has long been a gathering place for some homeless people as well as petitioners. The director became involved in the homeless relief charity in 2007, and continued to follow the film, which the director finished editing eight years later. The film was selected for the 12th China Independent Film Festival Documentary Competition.

The story of petitioners and homeless people near Tiananmen Square.

South Side Street

Sparks   (An underground magazine during the Great Famine，The first issue ，Mimeograph ） 

Spark was an underground magazine that appeared in the Tianshui area of Gansu Province in northwestern China during the 1959-1961 Great Famine. The magazine was lost for decades but in the late 1990s began to be republished electronically, becoming the basis of documentary films, essays, and books. 

In 1959, the Great Famine was spreading across China. It was witnessed by a group of Lanzhou University students who had been branded as Rightists (see: Anti-Rightist Campaign) and sent down to labor in the rural area of Tianshui. They saw countless peasants dying of hunger, and witnessed cannibalism.

Led by Zhang Chunyuan, a history student at Lanzhou University, they founded Spark in the hope of alerting people to the unfolding disaster and analyzing its root causes. The students pooled their money to buy a mimeograph machine, carved their own wax plates, and printed the first issue. The thirty-page publication featured Lin Zhao's long poem, "A Day in Prometheus's Passion." The first issue also featured articles, such as "The Current Situation and Duty," which dissected the tragic situation of society at that time and hoped that the revolution would be initiated by the Communist Party from within. 

The students planned to send the magazine to the leaders of the provinces and cities with a view to correcting their mistakes. But before the first issue of Spark was mailed and while the second issue was still being edited, on September 30, 1960, these students in Wushan and Tianshui were arrested, along with dozens of local peasants who knew and supported them. Among them: Zhang Chunyuan was sentenced to life imprisonment and later executed; Du Yinghua, deputy secretary of the Wushan County Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for having interacted with the students, and later executed. Lin Zhao was detained and also executed. Other key members, such as Gu Yan, Tan Chanxue, and Xiang Chengjian, were all sentenced to long years in labor camps. 

In the 1990s, Tan Chanxue devoted herself to researching historical information and figures to bring this history to life. She found in her personnel file (档案）photographs of the magazine, as well as self-confessions and other evidence used in the students' trial. Eventually, the photos were collated into PDFs, which began to circulate around China.

Editors' note: This site the original handwritten version and a PDF of all the articles from the first issue of Spark. We will also make available transcripts of the essays in Chinese and are searching for volunteers to translate the texts into English. Please contact us if you're interested in helping!

An underground magazine published during the Great Famine

Spark, Issue 1

The Disillusionment of Splendor: A Cautionary Tale of a People's Commune

This book tells the story of China's first people's commune - the Chayashan People's Commune in the author's hometown. Chayashan is a township located in Suiping County, Xinyang City, southern Henan (now part of Zhumadian District). It is the location of the country's first people's commune established by Mao Zedong in 1958, and was also a model commune during the Great Leap Forward period. At the Lushan Conference in 1959, the commune was used in Mao Zedong's counterattack against Peng Dehuai, a general who opposed Mao's policies. 

The author Kang Jian is a war veteran. More than thirty years after the Great Famine, Kang Jian visited the villages in Chayashan to conduct an oral history investigation. He used oral interviews to record the daily lives and experiences of farmers under collective economic practices. The author writes in the form of interviews, showing the history of Chayashan People's Commune in detail, and using specific cases to present the relationship between national political behavior and individual destiny.

The Birth and Demise of a People's Commune

Disillusionment of Splendor: A Cautionary Tale of a People's Commune

On August 8, 1966, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) adopted the "Sixteen Articles" of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, Liu Wenhui, a young mechanic in Shanghai who had been labeled as a "rightist" in 1957, wrote pamphlets and leaflets clearly opposing the Cultural Revolution, the "Sixteen Articles", and authoritarianism and tyranny. He was arrested on November 26 of that year.  Four months later, he was executed  for "counter-revolutionary crimes." Liu Wenhui became the first person known to have been publicly shot for opposing the Cultural Revolution. The author of this book, Liu Wenzhong, was Liu Wenhui's co-defendant and survived thirteen years in prison. In this book, Liu Wenzhong describes in detail his brother Liu Wenhui's ideology as well as how he was killed by the tyrannical government.

The story of Liu Wenhui, the first person killed in Shanghai for opposing the Cultural Revolution

First Man against the Cultural Revolution and His Co-Conspirators, The

Feng Ke collaborated with Zhou Xun of the University of Hong Kong to collect information on the Great Famine. Zhou selected 121 items from the official archives to publish "The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History." Many of the archives they accessed at the time have since been classified again and are not available.

A rare look at official documents on the Great Famine

Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History, The

The Memoirs of Sima Lu: A Witness to the History of the Chinese Communist Party

Sima Lu (1919-2021) was an expert on the history of the Chinese Communist Party. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1937, then was politically persecuted in Yan'an, left it, and was expelled from the Party in 1941. In 1952, Sima Lu published *Eighteen Years of Struggle in Hong Kong*, writing about his tortuous journey from defecting to the Communist Party to his awakening and eventual choice of freedom. It became a sensation. He has made in-depth special studies on several leading figures of the CCP, such as Qu Qubai and Zhang Guotao. His memoir, *Witness to the History of the CCP*, is divided into three chapters according to its contents: the first is about his personal experience, the second about the first generation of CCP figures, and the third is devoted to the struggle between Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.

A Firsthand Perspective from Inside the Chinese Communist Party

Memoirs of Sima Lu: A Witness to the History of the Chinese Communist Party, The

Seeking: A Chronicle of the "Rightist Counter-Revolutionary Group" at Lanzhou University

During the worst years of the 1960 famine, a group of teachers and students at Lanzhou University decided to publish an underground publication, Spark, to alert Chinese people to the growing disaster and expose the authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party. Only two issues of this underground publication were printed before it was broken up as a counter-revolutionary group case and 43 people were arrested. 

The author of this book, Tan Chanxue, was a key participant and helped save the memory of Spark from being lost. Tan was the girlfriend of Zhang Chunyuan, the magazine's founder, and participated in key moments of the magazine's short lifespan. She was sentenced to 14 years in prison, but was later released and rehabilitated, and taught at the Jiuquan Teachers' Training School. In 1982, she was transferred to the Dunhuang Research Institute as an associate researcher, and retired in 1998, settling in Shanghai. 

It is largely through Tan's efforts that we know about Spark. She was able to look into her personnel file (dang'an), where she discovered the issues of the magazine, as well as confessions of the people arrested, and even her love letters to Zhang. She photographed this material and later it was turned into PDFs, which circulated around China starting in the late 1990s, helping to inspire books and movies.

Tan Chanxue's effort to reconstruct the legendary 1960 student journal

Sparks: A Chronicle of the Rightist Counter-Revolutionary Group at Lanzhou University

The Rise and Fall of the Red Guards: A Handbook of the Old Red Guards at Tsinghua High School

The Red Guard movement originated in the Tsinghua University Affiliated High School, a secondary school for faculty and staff of the university, as well as others aspiring to attend the elite university, including the sons and daughters of high-ranking cadres. Song Bailin was a senior high school student at Tsinghua High School, one of the founders and a core member of the Red Guards. 

Song kept a diary during the first years of the Cultural Revolution. Yu Ruxin, a researcher of the Cultural Revolution, felt that a section of Song Berlin's diary involving the Red Guards of Tsinghua High School was of historical value. Yu decided to publish the diary in its entirety as it was, with no deletion except for the correction of obvious typos. The diary covers the period from May 1966 to February 1968, the launching phase of the Cultural Revolution. A selection of diary entries from January to April 1966 has been included to give a better understanding of the political climate in China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution as well as the ideological trends of high school students.

Because the diary is a historic document directly from an era that is now more than half a century old, the diary lacks historical background and footnotes that might help current readers understand the context of that time. Fortunately, the current publication has a preface written by Luo Xiaohai, who explains the political atmosphere in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution and some of the key events of that time.

For readers today, the diaries are at times hard to decipher. The Red Guards quickly were criticized by others, including those in power. As the writer Hu Ping notes [in a 2007 review of the book](https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/pinglun/huping/Hu_ping-20071112.html), the reversal of support for the Red Guards must have caused confusion and even a sense of betrayal by many involved. The diary, however, reveals none of this inner turmoil, Hu Ping ascribes the Red Guards' silence to the fact that keeping a diary in that era was a way for participants to prove their revolutionary zeal. Thus they self-censored and wrote with the expectation that their words would be discovered and could be used against them. This means the diary provides little in the way of psychological insights in the Red Guards. 

It does, however, provide a way of understanding how totalitarian terror and power works on individual psychology. Thus when his classmates beat classmates and teachers, Song expressed embarrassment that he lacked their fervor and did not participate. This means that the diary is best seen as a primary document that shows the way young people thought at that time, rather than an exercise in self-reflection or criticism.

Diary of a Red Guard During the Cultural Revolution

Rise and Fall of the Red Guards: A Handbook of the Old Red Guards at Tsinghua High School

Wheat Seedling and Vegetable Blossom: A Chronicle of the Great Famine in Western Sichuan Province

Traditionally, the western Sichuan plain was known as China's "Land of Abundance," but it became a focal point of the Great Famine of 1959-1961. Sichuan was one of the hardest-hit areas, with the largest number of deaths from starvation in the country and one of the highest death rates. 

The title of the book, "Apricot Blossoms and Wheat Seedlings"  is taken from a popular revolutionary song of the Mao era. In March, 1958, the Communist Party held a central work conference (known as the Chengdu Conference) at the Jinniu Dam Guest House near Chengdu, during which Mao Zedong inspected the Hongguang (Shining Red) Commune in nearby Pixian County. Two songs were written to commemorate that occasion.. One was "Red Flowers Bloom in the Shining Red Commune," and the other was "Apricot Blossoms and Wheat Seedlings."

The author of this book, Dong Fu (the pen name of Wang Dongyu), was born in Wenjiang, in the western Sichuan plains. He belonged to the "lao san jie"--students whose education was disrupted during the Cultural Revolution. His father was a veteran CCP cadre who engaged in underground party work and who later was responsible for economic policies. As a youth and as a soldier during the Great Leap Forward in Sichuan, Dong Fu saw the famine first-hand. During the Cultural Revolution he enlisted in the army and worked as a reporter for the Chengdu Military District's Zhanqi News. 

After graduating from college, he began to work on this history. He was able to draw on his father's connections to research the book, in the 1980s and 1990s interviewing retired officials who knew his father and who could confide in him. Many have since passed away, giving this book great historical value. He was also able to collect extensive material from historical archives, also in part due to his father's and his own personal connections to the region.

This book was published by the Tianyuan Bookstore in Hong Kong in 2008 on the 50th anniversary of the start of the famine (some historians date the famine from 1958-1962, others from 1959-1961). In contrast to macro accounts of the Great Famine, such as Yang Jisheng's *[Tombstone](https://main--minjian-danganguan.netlify.app/collection/%E6%9D%A8%E7%BB%A7%E7%BB%B3-%E2%80%93-%E5%A2%93%E7%A2%91%EF%BC%9A%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E5%85%AD%E5%8D%81%E5%B9%B4%E4%BB%A3%E5%A4%A7%E9%A5%A5%E8%8D%92%E7%BA%AA%E5%AE%9E)* or Frank Dikötter's *[Mao's Great Famine](https://www.frankdikotter.com/books/maos-great-famine/)*, Dong Fu's work is a case study of the famine in one area. By focusing on the western plains around Chengdu, the author shows how Mao's policies destroyed agricultural life in even historically rich areas that in normal times are China's breadbaskets. 

Another feature of this book is its writing style. [In reviewing this book in 2009](https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/zhuanlan/shuwenpingjian/huping-05062009153055.html), the theorist Hu Ping notes that history writing in China was shaken up by William Manchester's *The Glory and the Dream*, which was published in China in 1979. It was a vividly written history of the United States between 1932 and 1972 that showed that history could be engaging and entertaining. Hu Ping sees Dong Fu's work as inspired by Manchester's work, giving a panoramic, deftly written account suitable for the general reader, but based on solid research. Dong Fu weaves in the top-level battles with ordinary people's views, as well as social and cultural history. He mines the archives for telling details, such as complaints that people filed with the government, witty jingles that they composed to express their pain, and folk traditions. Hu Ping, who also grew up in the same region around the same time, writes:

"During the years of the Great Leap Forward, I was in primary school and junior high school in Chengdu. Reading the relevant chapters of Dong Fu's book, I felt very close to it, and many people and events from that year came vividly to mind. This feeling is something I have never experienced when reading other books about the Great Leap Forward period—whether they are theory books, history books, or even literature books."

How Mao Zedong turned the land of heaven into a land of starvation

Wheat Seedlings and Vegetable Blossoms: A Chronicle of the Great Famine in Western Sichuan Province

Xu Zhiyong

Chinese human rights activist Dr. Xu Zhiyong, twice imprisoned for his longstanding advocacy of civil society in China, was sentenced to 14 years in prison by the Chinese government in April 2023. The documentary by independent director Lao Hu Miao was filmed over a four-year period, beginning with the seizure of the Public League Legal Research Center, which Xu Zhiyong helped found in 2009, and ending with Xu's first prison sentence in 2014. 

Yangmou - The Beginning and End of the Anti-Rightist Movement

The revised edition of this book was published by *Open Magazine* in Hong Kong in 2007. The first edition was published in 1991 and was revised and reprinted twice, in 1993 and 1995. The book collects a large amount of information about the anti-rightist movement, including survey interviews with victims of the anti-rightist movement and their relatives and friends. It is a complete record of the anti-rightist movement, which comprehensively analyzes and discusses the whole process of the anti-rightist movement, as well as its ins and outs, causes and consequences. Regarding the number of "rightists," the statistics of the CCP authorities had been limited to 550,000 people. According to Ding Lyric's analysis, there were about 1.2 million people who were labeled as "rightists" in the Anti-Rightist Movement.

The ins and outs of the Chinese Communist Party's anti-rightist campaign

On Family Background

Yu Luoke (May 1, 1942 - March 5, 1970): Worker, freelance writer, and public intellectual. 

Yu was born into an educated family in northeastern China, which for a period of time was under Japanese occupation. His father studied on a state scholarship in Waseda University in Tokyo, while his mother came from a wealthy family in Beijing and studied business at Tokyo Girls High School. When the two returned to China, they went into business, married, and had three children.

When the CCP took power, the family was declared part of the “bourgeois class” and like other “black elements”--classes of people who the party declared to be enemies–was persecuted. The father was arrested in 1952 on charges of tax evasion and released. In 1957, Yu Luoke’s parents were declared Rightists and sent to labor camps. In 1959, Yu graduated from high school with highest honors but as the offspring of an undesirable class was not permitted to attend university. In 1961, he was allowed to work on a farm in a Beijing suburb, where he realized that class identity was also important in rural China–landlords and their children were even beaten to death. In 1964 he returned to the city and apprenticed at a machinery factory. Yu realized that he was part of an untouchable caste in Maoist China and would be condemned forever, no matter what he believed or how hard he worked.

These experiences were the genesis of Yu’s essay, which became one of the most famous texts of the Mao era. Yu wrote it at the start of the Cultural Revolution. The ten-thousand character essay is called chushenglun, or “On Family Background” (sometimes translated as “On Class Origins"). In it, he warned that the “five black categories'' were becoming a permanent underclass, while China’s rulers were from the hongwulei, or “five red categories:” poor and lower-middle peasants, workers, revolutionary soldiers, revolutionary officials, and revolutionary martyrs, including their family members, children, and grandchildren. He warned of a new ruling class based on bloodlines. 

The essay was published in a journal that Yu and his brother Yu Luowen called the "Journal of Secondary School Cultural Revolution." In January 1967, about thirty thousand copies were printed, and the young men began distributing them around the capital, selling them for two cents a copy. They sold out in a few hours. In February, they printed another eighty thousand copies. 

Soon, hundreds of letters each day arrived at Yu Luoke’s local post office—so many that he had to go collect them in person. The missives detailed how the Communists’ policies had caused them to suffer. People traveled from across China to visit them at their home, excited that someone finally had uncovered how the Chinese Communist Party ruled. The editorial board was expanded to twenty people, and the group sponsored debates and seminars.

The Journal was closed down in April 1967. Yu Luoke began to write on economic inequality. In January 1968, he was arrested. Two years later, on 5 March 1970, Yu was executed by firing squad at Beijing Workers Stadium.

The creation of a caste system in Maoist China

According to official CCP statistics, some 550,000 people were directly labeled as rightists and persecuted during the Anti-Rightist campaign. These people, as well as others implicated in the campaign, are mostly unknown, except for a very few. The author, Shen Yuan, who was also labeled as a rightist when he was a university student in 1958, devoted himself to collecting and researching historical data on the anti-rightist campaign. He has compiled a book entitled Biographies of the 1957 Rightists, which attempts to present the truth about the Anti-Rightist campaign and its victims. The book is divided into four volumes of about 1.2 million words, containing the stories of about 600 rightists and about 240 historical photographs. 2016 marked the 60th anniversary of the Anti-Rightist campaign, and Shen Yuan used the original book as the basis for his New Biographies of the 1957 Rightists, expanding the number of people included to 1,588. Sha Yexin and Wu Yisan were both involved in the compilation of this book.

New Biographies of the 1957 Rightists 

"Smashing the Old World"-The Turmoil and Havoc of the Cultural Revolution

This volume is authored by Bu Weihua. Bu Weihua  was the originator of the Red Guards and the Red Guard movement. He became a member of the Red Guards at Tsinghua High School. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, he received professional training in history and was one of the first scholars in China to engage in the study of the Cultural Revolution. He not only understands  the pre-Cultural Revolution period, especially the Red Guard movement in Beijing,  but also has deep reflections on the catastrophe he experienced. This volume concisely depicts the panoramic images and processes of the Cultural Revolution from May 1966 to April 1969.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, History of the People's Republic of China, 1966-1968, Volume 6

Smashing the Old World: The Turmoil and Havoc of the Cultural Revolution

Sky Burial: The Fate of Tibet

In this book, author Wang Lixiong presents his arguments with a great deal of personal experience and field work. The book covers the history of the Tibetan issue, the current situation, and various aspects. The book was first published by Spiegel Publishing in Hong Kong in 1998, and an updated edition was released in 2009.

The Past and Future of Tibet

Yanhuang chunqiu, 2006, issue 10

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2006, issue 10

Yanhuang chunqiu, 2006, issue 11

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2006, issue 11

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2006, issue 12

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2006, issue 9

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 10

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 11

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 12

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 1

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 2

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 3

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 4

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 5

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 6

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 7

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 8

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2007, issue 9

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 1991, issue 3

Yanhuang Chunqiu, 1991, issue 1

On May 10, 1991, the Association for Yan Huang Culture was established in Beijing. On July 1 of the same year, the inaugural issue of *Yan Huang Chunqiu,* sponsored by the Association for Yan Huang Culture, was officially published, and Du Guanzheng, one of its founders, served as the first president of the journal. *Yan Huang Chunqiu* and its website mainly published historical accounts, interviews, and political-historical commentaries, aiming to restore historical facts, "fill in what is missing in mainstream history and check the falsehoods in hearsays" (in the words of the journal's editors), with political figures, writers, and scholars as its main contributing authors. The journal was deemed politically reformist and liberal in China and has attracted attention and interference for publishing articles on sensitive events in CCP history and advocating various reforms within the party. On July 17, 2016, Wu Wei, the magazine's executive editor, issued a "Statement for Ceasing Publication " signed by President Du Guanzheng, claiming that on July 15, due to the intervention of the Chinese National Academy of Arts, the journal “has lost its fundamental editorial and publishing conditions" and announcing that *Yan Huang Chunqiu* had ceased publication. Now the journal is sponsored by the Chinese National Academy of Art and continues to be published, but the historical filings on its official website prior to 2016 were removed in their entirety, with only the introduction and table of contents preserved.

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