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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 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. Purchase link：https://www.amazon.com/%E3%80%8A%E5%85%AB%E4%B9%9D%E6%B0%91%E9%81%8B%E5%8F%B2%E3%80%8B%E3%80%8A%E5%85%AB%E4%B9%9D%E6%B0%91%E8%BF%90%E5%8F%B2%E3%80%8B-%E7%AC%AC%E5%85%AB%E5%8D%B7-DEMOCRACY-MOVEMENT-Traditional-ebook/dp/B07VN848V8

Zhang Dongsun is an unavoidable but deliberately obscured figure in modern China. Considered the earliest translator of Western philosophy, a famous newspaperman, political commentator, and professor at Yenching University; the first mediator between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party in 1949, and the first Central People's Government Member. He was convicted of treason in 1951 and disappeared. The well-known writer and journalist Dai Qing completed this historical documentary after eight years of investigation and writing and nearly ten years of revising and updating. Taking Zhang Dongsun's life as the main theme, he wrote about changing times from the late Qing dynasty to the Cultural Revolution. An expanded edition of this book will be published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in 2022. The following is the link to purchase books from the publisher: https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3466

Land reform is one of the important events that affected the course of Chinese history in the twentieth century. Liao Yiwu spent two years on and off from the end of 2005 to complete <i>The Last Landlord</i>. The book comprises interviews with land reform survivors. As the author says, "Based on the degree of physical and mental weakening of the interviewees, I estimate that in another five or six years, the history of the land reform as orally told by those who witnessed it will be completely untraceable."

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/.