This book is Gao Hua's next masterpiece after *How the Red Sun Rose*. It entails a selection of papers published by the author between 1988 and 2004, covering the fields of Republican history, Communist Party history, and contemporary Chinese history. It captures the historical interaction between the present and the past. Gao reflects deeply on the far-reaching Chinese Communist Revolution. With a rigorous and empirical research methodology, he sketches a complex and colorful picture of history, presenting the multiple facets of twentieth-century China's history.
The author of this article, Chen Feng, was born in 1962. His hometown is Huang Sichong, Sanjia Brigade, Bainong Commune, Feidong County, Anhui Province. According to his records, in the winter of 1959 to the spring of 1960 during the Great Famine, his grandfather, grandmother, grandfather, grandmother's relatives and relatives, and countless members of his extended family and village, 57 people died of starvation.
More than 70 years ago, a massive wave of revolutionary terror swept through the CCP-led Jiangxi Soviet Union. Thousands of Red Army officers and soldiers, as well as members of the Party and the general public in the base area, were brutally murdered in a purge called the "Purging of the AB Troupe." Gao Hua's article examines why Mao Zedong initiated the "purge of the AB Group" in the Red Army and the base areas. What was Mao's rationale for the Great Purge? What is the relationship between the Great Terror and the establishment of a new society? Why did Mao stop using the "Fighting the AB Groups" as a means of resolving internal conflicts in the Party after he assumed real power in the CCP?
Originally published in Hong Kong in Chinese in 2000, Gao Hua’s epic description of an early Communist Party campaign against dissent describes a pattern of thought reform and control that would hold true for decades to come. Written despite official harassment and Gao’s failing health, How the Red Sun Rose is a touchstone for China’s unofficial history movement. It was translated into English in 2019 and published by Columbia University Press. Purchase here: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/how-the-red-sun-rose/9789629968229.
This book recounts Hu Yaobang's efforts to overturn people falsely accused of being "Rightists" during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the 1950s. It is written by Dai Huang (1928-2016, formerly known as Dai Shulin), a Communist propagandist and later senior editor at the Xinhua News Agency, who was also persecuted in the Mao era and rehabilitated thanks to Hu's efforts.
This means that the book is not entirely objective–Dai does not analyze too closely Hu's history of slavishy following Mao's policies. Instead, he aims to capture the excitement felt by the hundreds of thousands who suffered in the Mao era and who were rehabilitated in the 1970s and '80s thanks to Hu. At 300,000 Chinese characters, or more than 200,000 English words, it is a weighty compendium that includes previously unreported details of famous public intellectuals and party members persecuted by the party and how Hu rehabilitated them. For example, Dai recounts the case of Ge Peiqi, who was a Communist Party spy who was toppled for his opposition to the party's corruption and privilege. Dai explains the case in depth and how Ge was eventually cleared.
Dai represented a liberal wing of the party that believed in the need for the party to address its mistakes. At his funeral people such as Du Daozheng (the editor of China Through the Ages 炎黄春秋) and Tie Liu (publisher of the alternative history journal 往事微痕) attended. The book also contains a preface by Li Rui, who participated in China Through the Ages and was also a mainstay of the party's liberal wing.
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.