“The Course of Reform”, a memoir by Zhao Ziyang, former General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was published on May 29, 2009 by New Century Press in Hong Kong. Its English translation, “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang” was published on May 13 before that. According to the book's preface, in 1992, Du Guanzheng, an old subordinate of Zhao Ziyang and former director of the State Press and Publication Administration, together with Xiao Hongda, another former high-ranking CCP official, persuaded Zhao Ziyang, who was under house arrest, to organize his experiences into a book.
Purchase link: https://www.kobo.com/hk/zh/ebook/ZoerWPfG8TiqoXIYwvW2iw.
The documentary "Ram" was filmed by independent director Tiger Temple in 2016 and is available here in a revised version by the author in 2021. The film documents a real-life incident that took place in Xi'an during the "1983 crackdown". The encounter of the artist Gong Yang (real name Li Xiaoming), the main character of the documentary, is quite representative. It reflects the cruelty and absurdity of the "1983 Crackdown" political campaign launched under the direction of Deng Xiaoping.
The author was a Hong Kong-based observer for the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch. Remembering Tiananmen is a long article first published in The Nationmagazine in November 1990. It was written after witnessing the crackdown around the square during the night of June 3 until 4 a.m. the next morning.
Author Hu Ping was involved in the Xidan Democracy Wall movement in the late 1970s and now lives in the United States.
He has successively chaired the pro-democracy publications <i>China Spring</i> and <i>Beijing Spring</i>. This book, published in 1992, analyzes the reasons for the failure of the June Fourth Movement and summarizes the lessons learned. The last two chapters suggest how to continue the pro-democracy movement in the future.
From July 17 to 24, 1991, seventeen student leaders who had participated in and led the 1989 student movement and later went into exile held a "Seminar on Historical Review and Reflection on the 1989 Student Movement" in Paris, France, to review and reflect on this great democracy movement in modern Chinese history. This book is organized according to the audio recordings of the speeches made at the seminar. It covers the following topics: the Peking University School Society Fever in 1988; the establishment of the Peking University Preparatory Committee; the founding of the Peking University Higher Education Union; the initiation of the hunger strike; the founding of the Hunger Strike Group; the founding of the Dialogue Group; the imposition of martial law; the founding of the Commanding Office of the Defense of Tiananmen Square; the founding of the Joint Meeting of the Capital; the establishment of martial law; the establishment of the Tiananmen Square Defense Command; the establishment of the Joint Meeting of Various Sectors in the Capital; the retreat from Tiananmen Square; the overseas student movement, etc. It includes rare historical material.
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.
Professor Chen Yongfa's book examines the history of the Chinese Communist Party from the perspective of modern Chinese history. It divides it into three stages: revolutionary seizure of power, continuous revolution, and farewell revolution. It delves into three major issues in CCP history: nationalism, grassroots power structure, and ideological transformation and control. published by Taiwan's Linking Publishing in 2001.
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 Mirror Books in Hong Kong in 1998, and an updated edition was released in 2009.
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.
This book goes beyond the individual perspective of a memoir to recount the movement from the perspective of the student collective. It focuses on the vivid portrayal of characters and their interactions. As the author puts it, this is the first time that the 1989 pro-democracy movement and the June 4 tragedy are "recounted as a complete and coherent attempt at narrative history." This book was originally written in English and published in 2009 on the 20th anniversary of June Fourth. The author himself later translated it into Chinese and released it on the eve of June 4 this year. The author, Eddie Cheng, was originally a student in the Physics Department of Peking University in the class of '80. He caught up with the election campaign right after he entered the school. Later, he became an important organizer of the student movement, having spearheaded the two campus pro-democracy campaigns of '84 and '85. In 1986, he went to the United States to study abroad. Currently he resides in the US state of Colorado.
The book can be purchased <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982320302">here</a>.
In the fall of 2005, residents of Taishi Village became increasingly frustrated and angered by the sale of land by village officials; hundreds of villagers signed a petition calling for the removal of the village chief. The villagers occupied the village committee’s financial office and expressed their demands through sit-ins and other forms of protests. The government dispatched the police to arrest village activists, but the villagers insisted on starting a formal recall process. The government finally sent a team to the village to verify the signatures for the petition.
<i>The Taishi Village</i> recall incident generated attention from Chinese and foreign media, and caused uneasiness among local government officials. On September 12, 2005, police arrested dozens of villagers who were participating in a sit-in in the village committee room. Despite the pressure, villagers elected a committee to remove the village committee director. The government then dispatched more men to exert pressure, forcing elected members to withdraw one by one. Hired patrol teams eventually drove lawyers and reporters out of the village.
This documentary records the protest scenes and tragic ending of Taishi village’s movement for autonomy, and presents the surging rights consciousness in rural areas in Guangdong. This incident demonstrates villagers’ ability to exercise their right to vote and the government’s inertial approach to grassroots democracy movements.
This documentary is in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
This book was published in Hong Kong in 2009, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of June Fourth. The author, Zhang Wanshu, was the Director of the Domestic News Department of Xinhua News Agency during the June Fourth Incident. This book provides a historical account of the June 4 incident from the unique perspective of the official media, including a lot of insider information. Famous journalist Yang Jijian commented that the book's historical authenticity is beyond doubt, and that it is an indispensable historical document for the study of the June Fourth Incident. In the form of daily events, the book records the situation from April 14th to June 10th, 1989—including the mobilization of 10 armies by the Central Military Commission from the five major military regions, their march to Tiananmen Square along six routes, and the army's entry into the city in disguise, etc. Of particular interest is Zhang Wanshu's citation of Tan Yunhe, then party secretary of the Red Cross Society of China, who said that there were 727 deaths in the June 4 incident—including 713 students and mass deaths and 14 military deaths. This figure is far from the 2,700 recorded by the Red Cross Society of China and has led to much controversy.
Due to poverty in rural areas in Henan Province—part of China’s Central Plains—many farmers contracted AIDS by selling their blood. This documentary dives into the lives of these AIDS patients, depicting the manner in which they cope with life, officials’ responses, and the stories of volunteers who helped the infected villagers. The filmmaker visited several villages with high incidence of AIDS, interviewing and recording people’s accounts of how the “plasma economy” arose. This documentary presents the living condition of families and individuals, especially women and children, who contracted AIDS due to blood donation and blood transfusions, and demonstrates the formation of grassroots organizations.
This film is in Chinese with both Chinese and English subtitles.
This documentary tells the story of the lives of three families of coal miners in the mountains of eastern Sichuan. Winner of the 35th Margaret Mead Movie Director's Award in 2011. Directed by Liu Yuanchen.
He Jiadong is a Chinese publisher. He joined the Chinese Communist Party at an early age. After 1949, he founded the Workers' Publishing House, one of the propaganda mouthpieces of the CCP. In 1957, he was designated as a rightist and later labeled as an anti-Party element. In 1965, Kang Sheng criticized him. He was sent down to Chengwu County in Shandong Province, where he was put under local control for 14 years. During the Cultural Revolution, he was taken back to Beijing and criticized, which affected his family and led to the unnatural death of his mother and two sons. In 1979, after the rightist was corrected and completely rehabilitated, he became the executive vice-president and deputy editor-in-chief of the Workers' Publishing House; in 1983, he founded the monthly <i>Rensheng (Life)</i>. In 1984, he founded <i>Kaituo (Pioneering)</i> magazine. He was investigated for publishing Liu Binyan's <i>The Second Kind of Loyalty</i>, and resigned from his post in 1985. The above weekly newspapers, bimonthly magazines and websites were all suspended and closed by the authorities. He has written a large number of articles exploring China's development path from the end of authoritarianism to constitutional democracy. He himself had a 60-year career as a "red publisher" but never had the freedom to publish. Even his own collection of essays was never published. Until the end of his life, he never saw a printed volume of his essays—the printed books were seized and confiscated by the Chinese authorities.
The book can be purchased <a href="https://www.fellowspress.com/shop1/p/-4"> link</a>.
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.
The documents in this book come from two high-level meetings of the CCP held after the June 4 Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989, namely, the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Committee of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the CCP and the Fourth Plenary Session of the Thirteenth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which was held on June 23rd and 24th at the Beijing West Guest House. The author claims that the documents were copied and kept for many years by an unnamed senior official within the CCP. This set of documents was formed when the CCP made its final conclusions on the June 4 incident. It is also a record of the high-level political operations within the CCP. These documents reveal the ultimate secret of the mechanism by which the Communist Party has always held absolute power. It was published by New Century Press in 2019. Special thanks to Bao Pu, founder of Hong Kong's New Century Press and son of Bao Tong, former political secretary of Zhao Ziyang, for authorizing CUA to share the book.
<i>The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement</i> is a sociological monograph. It explains the process of the 1989 school movement and interprets the political and economic situation from four perspectives: state legitimacy, ecological environment and mobilization structure, discourse and modes of action, and public opinion. Author Zhao Dingxin interviewed 70 participants in the movement at the time. He also examined many little-known domestic documents. Thus, theory and evidence are closely intertwined.
The book won the 2002 Distinguished Book Award (Collective Action/Social Movements) and the 2001 Distinguished Book Award (Asian and Asian American) from the American Sociological Association.
It is published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.