Explore the collection

The author of this book, Xie Youtian, a former researcher at the Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences, was invited to be a visiting scholar at Stanford University in the late 1980s and a guest researcher at the Hoover Institution. This book describes how the Chinese Communist Party took advantage of the Japanese invasion of China to build up its strength and eventually gained power. It was published by Mirror Books in Hong Kong in 2002.

Author Li Zhisui served as Mao's medical team leader and was the first director of the PLA's San 105 Hospital. This book is a memoir that he wrote. It details Li Zhisui's information from 1954, when he started as Mao's personal physician, to 1976, when Mao died, a period of 22 years. In his writing, Mao's private life is extremely absurd and touches on all aspects of the struggle against some of the CCP's personnel. After the book was published in Taiwan, it was completely banned on the mainland. Originally written in English, the book was translated into English by Hongchao Dai, former head of the political science department at the University of Detroit, with a foreword by China expert Andrew James Nathan, and with Anne F. Thurston as an assistant editor. was published in English by Blue Lantern Books in 1994. The Chinese edition was translated from the English with the assistance of Shushan Liao and published by Taiwan Times Culture in 1994. Lee died in the United States in February 1995, six months after the book was published.

This book is a compilation of some of Gao Hua's speeches, book reviews, commentaries on current affairs, reviews of student papers, and lecture transcripts. It includes his studies and reflections on themes around revolution, civil war, and nationalism, his comments on the works of Long Yingtai, Wang Dingjun, and Mao Zedong, and his observations on Taiwan's social and political realities during his visits to Taiwan. In addition, the book contains a selection of Gao Hua's lecture notes on the theory and methodology of historiographical research, as well as on the production of official historical narratives and the development of folk history, enabling readers to gain further understanding of the philosophy and methodology behind Gao Hua’s research. The book was published by Guangxi Normal University Press in November 2015 before the fourth anniversary of Gao Hua's death, for which the publisher was disciplined by the Central Propaganda Department and the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.

The author, Li Yuzhen, published this book in 1997. The contents are all taken from the declassified archives of the former Soviet Union. Almost all of the 205 documents in this book are published for the first time. The documents reveal the various dimensions of Moscow's relations with China from 1920 to 1925 as well as little-known inside stories. It shows that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the real decision-maker of the Comintern. This book shows the complex relationship between China and the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party and the Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang, and Moscow and the various political forces in the Chinese court from different perspectives. It provides important clues for the study of history.

Tang Degang is a historian and biographer who specializes in oral history. In the latter half of his life, he settled in the United States and taught at Columbia University and the City University of New York. In the field of history, he put forward the "Three Gorges Theory of History", which divides the change of Chinese social system into three major stages: feudalism, imperialism, and civil rule. The book was originally titled <i>Mao Zedong's Dictatorship, 1949~1976</i>, but was renamed <i>Thirty Years of New China </i> when it was released on the mainland.

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 <i>Lhasa 1959!</i> by drawing on interviews, information searches, and rare historical photographs provided by the Tibetan government in exile, 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.

The Great Famine in China in the 1960s was a rare famine in human history. From 1958 to 1962, according to incomplete statistics, 36 million people died of starvation in China; due to starvation the birthrate is estimated to have dropped to around 40 million. The number of people who died of starvation and the lowered birthrate due to starvation totaled more than 70 million, which is not only the largest number of deaths among all the disasters that occurred in China's history, but also the most painful and unprecedented tragedy in the history of mankind today. Was this a natural disaster or a man-made disaster? Officials deliberately covered it up and tried to minimize it, forbid any public discussion or expression about it. Yang Jisheng, a senior reporter of Xinhua News Agency, personally experienced the death of his father in the famine. Since then, he has devoted his heart and soul to this story. He has spent several years on it, running through a dozen or so provinces where the disaster was the most serious, and personally checking countless archives and records, both public and secret. He has interviewed the people involved and checked the evidence over and over again. Thus, he felt confident that he could, with the heart of the historical pen and the conscience of the news reporter, make a number of drafts, and truly recapture this tragic history of the human race and analyze the causes of this tragedy with a large amount of facts and data. With a wealth of facts and figures, he identifies the main cause of the famine as the totalitarian system. This is a book carries the collective memory of many ordinary Chinese people, and is a tombstone for the 36 million victims. This book is published by Tiandi Books in Hong Kong. The English version of <i>Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 </i> was translated by American author Stacy Mosher and can be purchased <a href= "https://www.amazon.com/Tombstone-Great-Chinese-Famine-1958-1962/dp/0374533997">here</a>.

The author of this book, Ms. Wang Lingyun, is the mother of Wang Dan, a student leader of the June Fourth Movement. She graduated from the History Department of Peking University and worked at the National Museum next to Tiananmen Square for decades. This memoir, published in Taiwan in 2021, is an account of the major events in modern Chinese history, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movemen. This is the link to purchase the book: https://www.eslite.com/product/1001273162681985770003

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, 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." (https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/zhuanlan/shuwenpingjian/huping-05062009153055.html)

Around the eighth century A.D., the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, Guru Rinpoche, prophesied, "When the iron bird flies in the sky and the iron horse runs on the earth, the Tibetans will be dispersed all over the world like ants, and the Buddha's Dharma will be spread into the land of the red people." More than 1,000 years later, in the middle of the 20th century, the Chinese Communist Party drove the "iron bird" across the sky and rode the "iron horse" across the plateau. The Tibetans courageously rose up to resist resulting in with countless deaths countless deaths. Those who survived were forced to leave their homeland and live in exile in India, drifting around the world. Thus, the prophecy came true. From a military point of view, the Tibetan war in Tibet was a victory, but it received only minimal publicity. The official version of the Party's history is either vague or evasive about the bloody massacre during the entry into Tibet, attempting to cover it up by "suppressing armed rebellion" and "purging counter-revolutionaries". More than sixty years later, this war has yet to be demystified. Li Jianglin, an independent scholar, was moved by the tragedy of the war and the plight of the Tibetans, and endeavored to restore the historical facts. Since 2004, she has devoted herself to research, visiting hundreds of Tibetan elders, searching for tens of thousands of historical materials, collecting military archives, and comparing them with the official published materials of the Communist Party of China, in order to present memories of past, little by little.

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 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.

The Rectification Movement took place in Yan'an, North Shaanxi Province, in the 1940s. This book, written by scholars within the Chinese official system, attempts to chronicle the ins and outs of the Rectification Movement in Yan'an and the base areas, analyzing its causes and the logical development of its results. It is rich in information that is only found here. This book was published by Zhejiang People's Publishing House in 1999.