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.
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In March 1989, the book Yangtze Yangtze was published by the Guizhou People's Publishing House just as the Tiananmen student protests were about to begin in Beijing. The book fed into this intellectual ferment, challenging the technocratic reasons for the Three Gorges Dam, which eventually would dam the Yangtze River in the name of flood control and electrical power generation.
The book was edited by the journalist Dai Qing, the daughter of a well-known Communist Party activist and leader. The book challenged the project's decision-making process, with a broad array of scientists, journalists, and intellectuals arguing that it was not democratic and did not take into account all viewpoints. It was widely read in China and translated into foreign languages.
After the Tiananmen protests were violently suppressed, Dai Qing was arrested and imprisoned for ten months in Qincheng Prison as an organizer of the uprising. Yangtze Yangtze was criticized as “promoting bourgeois liberalization, opposing the Four Fundamental Principles (of party control), and creating public opinion for turmoil and riots.” The book was taken off the shelves and destroyed, with some copies burned. It became the first banned book resulting from the decision-making process of the Three Gorges Project.
The book is banned in China. The English-language edition can be read online at Probe International: https://journal.probeinternational.org/three-gorges-probe/yangtze-yangtze/.
