Writer Wu Yisan is the founder of Hong Kong's May 7 Society, an organization dedicated to the collection, research and publishing of everything related to the anti-rightist campaign in 1957,to restore and present the truth about a period of history characterized by severe persecution of remedial intellectuals. Over the years, Mr. Wu has devoted himself to compiling The Dictionary of Names of 1957 Victims. As the Chief Editor of The Hong Kong May 7 Society Publishing House, he also published The Biography of the Rightists of the May 7.
This book is a collection of his political papers, comprising more than 50 published and unpublished essays primarily written between 2004 and 2009, criticizing CCP from various perspectives, including history, current affairs, and culture.
Writer Wu Yisan is the founder of Hong Kong Five-Seven Society, an organization established in 2007 and dedicated to the collection, research and publishing of everything related to the Anti-Rightist campaign in 1957, to restore and present the truth about a period of history characterized by severe persecution of intellectuals. Over the years, Mr. Wu has devoted himself to compiling *[The Dictionary of Names of 1957 Victims](https://minjian-danganguan.org/collection/1957%E5%B9%B4%E5%8F%97%E9%9A%BE%E8%80%85%E5%A7%93%E5%90%8D%E5%A4%A7%E8%BE%9E%E5%85%B8)*. As the Chief Editor of The Hong Kong Five-Seven Society Publishing House, he also published *The Biographies of the 1957 Rightists* and *[New Biographies of the 1957 Rightists](https://minjian-danganguan.org/collection/%E2%80%9C%E4%BA%94%E4%B8%83%E2%80%9D%E5%8F%B3%E6%B4%BE%E5%88%97%E4%BC%A0%EF%BC%88%E4%B8%8A%EF%BC%89)*.
This book is a collection of Wu’s political essays, including nearly one hundred of his published and unpublished essays and speeches between 1999 and 2017, including historical and current affairs analyses, with an emphasis on commentaries of persecuted intellectuals and political dissidents. These people are often called "traitors of China (han jian)" by CCP, but Wu Yisan argues that the CCP is the real traitor that betrays the country and its people.
Our archive also hosts another anthology of his, *[Is Chen Yi a Good Comrade](https://minjian-danganguan.org/collection/%E6%AD%A6%E5%AE%9C%E4%B8%89%E6%94%BF%E8%AE%BA%E6%96%87%E9%9B%86%EF%BC%881%EF%BC%89)*?
An estimated 460,000 to 1.4 million people were persecuted in the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957-1959). The event was one of the most important political campaigns in the history of the People's Republic because it effectively silenced independent intellectual thought in the Mao era, paving the way for disasters, such as the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution.
Wu Yisan spent more than ten years researching the lives of this campaign's victims. At 33,000 entries, the list is far from complete but it gives the human perspective on the tragedy in a scope never before attempted. Among the devastating details is the story of Qian Zhongshu, one of 20th century China's best-known writers. Qian's father, Qi Jibo, had been declared a Rightist but died before he could be publicly humiliated. So Qian Zhongshu and his brother-in-law Shi Shenghuai, were forced to attend a mass rally and be criticized in his place. They did so while holding the dead man's "spirit tablet," a piece of wood used in a family shrine with the deceased name, and birth and death dates.
The dictionary was originally published as a CD-Rom. Mr. Wu has made the text version available to the China Unofficial Archive and we are now working to make it a searchable PDF for those who cannot access the CD-Rom version. The Dictionary of Names of 1957 Victims was published by the Humanities Publishing Center and funded by the Laogai Research Foundation.
"Life and Death In Shanghai" (also known as "Shen Jiang Meng Hui") is an autobiography by female writer Zheng Nian. First published in English in 1986, it was subsequently translated into various languages and published in various countries. In the book, Zheng Nian recounts her personal experiences from the beginning of the Cultural Revolution to her departure from China in the early 1980s. After her release from prison in 1973, she learned that, shortly after her imprisonment, her only daughter, Zheng Meiping, had been persecuted and had died. She then tried to find out the cause of her daughter's death. The book traces how the ideals of intellectuals were crushed by politics.
The author of this book, Yang Jisheng, is a veteran journalist with 35 years of experience in journalism at Xinhua News Agency, China's official news organization. He knows a great deal about the ups and downs of Chinese politics after the end of the Cultural Revolution as well as the intricate power struggles at the top and has a lot of first-hand information. He personally interviewed Zhao Ziyang, Zhu Houze, Li Rui, Ren Zhongyi, An Zhiwen, Tian Jiyun, and other important people. “Political Struggles in China's Reform Era”, first published in Hong Kong in November 2004, was the subject of a series of crackdowns by the authorities against Yang Jisheng. It was republished in 2010 by Hong Kong's Cosmo Books.
This article is taken from six accounts by Mr. Liang Zhiyuan. Mr. Liang Zhiyuan was the deputy director of the Bo County People's Committee (i.e., the government) office during the Great Famine. He also served as the head of the Production and Welfare Section of the County Party Committee's Rural Work Department and the deputy director of the County Party Committee's Living and Welfare Office, where he was responsible for a lot of things. In 2002 and 2005, based on three years of rural work notes and relevant historical information, Mr. Liang Zhiyuan wrote a number of articles describing the Bo County famine, including "A Painful Lesson in History - The Unnatural Deaths of the Rural Population in Bo County." and several other articles. Due to the sensitivity of the matter, these have not been published publicly, and many of these materials are released to the outside world for the first time in this article.
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>.