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The author of this book, Luo Pinghan, is a native of Anhua County, Hunan Province. He graduated from the Party History Department of Renmin University of China and served as director and professor of the Party History Teaching and Research Department of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. This book was published by Fujian People's Publishing House in 2003. With Mao Zedong's affirmation, the system of people's communes was rapidly promoted across the country in 1958. At that time, the people's commune was both a production organization and a grassroots political power. Its rise and fanatical development are closely related to the subsequent Great Famine.  As a scholar within the system, the author’s view of history also belongs to orthodox ideology. Although this book is narrated from the official ideology of the CCP, it uses rich and detailed historical materials to comprehensively and systematically introduce the history of the People's Communes, giving it a reference value for a comprehensive understanding of this movement.

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.

Few books on recent Chinese history have caused such controversy as "The Tiananmen Papers". The book is ostensibly a collection of original documents compiled by Zhang Liang, a pseudonym for someone claiming to be a high-ranking CCP official who leaked the papers. The book’s credibility was aided by it being edited by two well-known western scholars of China, Perry Link, then of Princeton University and now of the University of California, Riverside, as well as Columbia University professor Andrew J. Nathan. An introduction was written by Orville Schell, a well-known writer on China who was then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.  Almost immediately upon publication, the book was criticized for its unclear provenance, a point aided by Zhang Liang’s anonymity. Most scholars agreed that the papers were a mixture of previously released documents from government offices, which were uncontroversial, and accounts of meetings between senior leaders. The latter came under scrutiny, with some saying that the language appeared stilted or seemed to mix in language used in leaders’ public speeches.  This essay by the well-known Hong Kong publisher Bao Pu points out that since 2004, most people seem to feel that the issue of provenance will never be settled but that the documents are still important historically. Bao critiques this, using books published over the past two decades to update the question of authenticity. In careful language, he further questions key points of the documents, showing that they do not match new material, such as memoirs. Bao's conclusion: the Tiananmen Papers are not documents from the CCP’s archive, which is their claim, but rather works of dubious origin that cannot be used to better understand the events leading up to the massacre of civilians on the night of June 3-4, 1989. The top-secret documents, Bao writes, are a “phantom” that must not be used as building blocks for history.