In August 2008, after the 100-day anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, rescue teams began to withdraw and the media stopped reporting on the casualties of school employees, teachers, and students. Chengdu environmental worker Tan Zuoren and local volunteers, however, were still searching for the cause of the collapse of school buildings within the ruins. As winter arrived, Tan Zuoren and his colleague Xie Yihui trekked through more than 80 towns and villages in 10 counties and cities, covering a total of 3,000 kilometers. Finally, before the May 12 anniversary, they issued a report of their investigation, which was the first independent inquiry report on the Sichuan earthquake’s impact on schools. At the same time, Beijing artist Ai Weiwei furthered civilian investigation and new volunteers arrived in Sichuan to search for the names of students who died. This documentary is an incomplete record of a civilian investigation and a piece of testimony submitted to the court charging Tan Zuoren with “suspected subversion of the state.”
This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
On May 12, 2008, when the Great Sichuan Earthquake struck, writer Liao Yiwu began to write "Chronicle of the Great Earthquake", which was serialized in <i>Democratic China</i> and reprinted on several Chinese websites. It had a wide impact. Liao went to Dujiangyan, Juyuan Township, Yingxiu and other earthquake-hit areas to conduct on-the-spot interviews. His travels and writings during the earthquake were reported and translated by many mainstream media.
In April 2009, Taiwan's Asian Culture Publishing published and distributed the traditional Chinese edition of <i>Earthquake Insane Asylum</i>, a pictorial and textual factual record that preserves the living conditions of the people during of the Sichuan earthquake.
This book was originally published in the series *Micro Traces of the Past* - Documentary Volume - No. 6, edited by Huang Heqing, founded in 2007. Gan Cui, a student at Renmin University of China, was classified as a rightist in 1957. He became lovers with Lin Zhao, a rightist student who came from Peking University to work in the data room. Gan Cui was later sent to Xinjiang. When he returned, he learned that Lin Zhao had been killed. This book (in 140,000 words) is a manuscript of Gan Cui's memories of Lin Zhao in the context of the 1989 pro-democracy movement.
This book is a masterpiece by Chinese scholar Li Honglin. The author was a representative of the ideological liberation movement during reform and opening up and was arrested after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. This book summarizes the various ideological purges launched by the CCP since its establishment in 1949.
“In Search of My Homeland” is a collection of essays in three volumes written by Gao Ertai during his exile abroad. In this book, Gao looks back on his life. From his hometown of Gaochun, a small town in Jiangsu Province, to Suzhou, then to Lanzhou, Jiuquan, Dunhuang, Beijing, Chengdu, and the United States, Gao has undergone tremendous suffering, lost his home and family, and finally had to go into exile in a foreign country. Even though the work is widely regarded as having great literary merit, Gao uses real names and places, which makes the work a valuable historical document, especially for describing the Great Famine, and the brutal suppression of intellectual life during the Cultural Revolution at the Dunhuang research academy, which is one of China's most prestigious cultural institutions.
In an [interview](https://web.archive.org/web/20240130211408/https://www.aisixiang.com/data/80804.html), Gao explained why he wrote the book: "Searching for my homeland is nothing but searching for meaning.... Life is short and small, and its meaning can only be rooted in the external world and in the long history. My sense of drift and meaninglessness, that is, a feeling that the world has no order, history has no logic, and the individual has no home, seems to be a kind of destiny. My writing is nothing but a resistance to this destiny."
In 2004, a censored version of the first two volumes of this book was published by Huacheng Publishing House in Guangzhou; in 2011, an updated version was published by Beijing October Arts and Literature Publishing House, but still censored. The version uploaded to our archive is the traditional Chinese version of the complete three volumes published by Taiwan INK Publishing House in 2009.
This book contains a number of articles in memory of Lin Zhao. It concerns the death of Lin Zhao as well as Lin Zhao's love, pursuits, and disillusionment. This book was published by Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House in 2000.
Independent director Tiger Temple 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.
This documentary records the stories of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The narrators mainly consist of the parents of students who fell victim to the earthquake, and the film is interspersed with comments from media workers, independent scholars, internet authors, geologists, and environmental protection and legal workers. They expressed their views on the Sichuan earthquake from different perspectives.
This film is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
In this film, the filmmaker accompanied volunteer Xie Yihui as she visited the parents of students who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to find people with knowledge of the architectural blueprint of the Beichuan Middle School. This documentary presents the rise of earthquake tourism and records the mindset of volunteers, bereaved parents, and tourists at the anniversary of the earthquake. This film is interspersed with historical film materials of Beichuan Middle School’s building samples taken by parents in 2008, as well as architect Zhu Tao’s analysis of the construction drawings and building quality. It also shows the perceptions of mothers, teachers, and photographers.
This series of films are in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
Chinese intellectual Xu Liangying is a scholar of the history of scientific thought and an active warrior in defense of human rights. He weathered China's most extreme political storms and began to speak out again after China opened up slightly in 1977. This book collects his political speeches between 1977-1999. Originally published by Spiegel Publishing in Hong Kong in 2001, the book was later made into a PDF version by Xu Liangying's family in the hope that it would be circulated online to a wider audience.
Lin Zhao, formerly known as Peng Lingzhao, a native of Suzhou, was admitted to the journalism department of Peking University in 1954, but was classified as a Rightist in 1957. She was arrested and imprisoned in October 1960 because of her involvement with the underground magazine <i>Spark</i>. In 1965, Lin Zhao was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for "counter-revolutionary crimes." On April 29, 1968, she was sentenced to death and executed on the same day at the age of 36. This book is a collection of more than sixty articles written in memory of Lin Zhao.
This movie records how Zhang Xianzhi went from being a soldier to a prisoner and then to an independent writer. His experience and thought process is compared with that of the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn. The title of the film is taken from the title of Zhang Xianzhi's book <i>Anecdotes from the Gulag</i>, which takes the viewer on a journey to China's Gulag Archipelago, a labor camp in Sichuan. The extreme conditions and little-known tragic history of the camp are presented. The movie is 42 minutes long and was filmed in 2012.
Author Xin Hao Nian tries to analyze the modern history of China since the Xinhai Revolution. He pointsout that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is a restoration of the authoritarian system, and the Republic of China (ROC) represents China's road to a republic. The first volume of the book defends and clarifies the history of the Kuomintang (KMT), arguing that the KMT is not a "reactionary faction" as claimed by the CCP. The second volume criticizes the revolution and history of the CCP. The book was first printed in 1999 by Blue Sky Publishing House (USA) and reprinted in June 2012 by Hong Kong's Schaefer International Publishing. It is banned on the mainland.
This film follows the stories of environmental activist Tan Zuoren and artist Ai Weiwei. In July 2009, Tan Zuoren was charged with the crime of “Inciting subversion of state power,” and his trial was held in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. Ai Weiwei was invited by Tan’s lawyer to testify in court, but the night before the trial, he was assaulted by the police and detained in a hotel. To everyone’s surprise, Ai turned on the tape recorder before the police entered his residence and managed to record the incident. Later, Ai and his colleagues released a documentary about this incident, titled “Disturbing the Peace” (or “Laoma Tihua”).
This film interviews the people behind the scenes of “Disturbing the Peace,” including the director, photographers, editors, and audiences of the film, who discuss the relationship between citizens and government authority.
This series of films are in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.