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Periodicals
Spark, Issue 1
<i>Spark</i> was an underground magazine that appeared in the Tianshui area of Gansu Province in northwestern China during the 1959-1961 Great Famine. The magazine was lost for decades but in the late 1990s began to be republished electronically, becoming the basis of documentary films, essays, and books.
In 1959, the Great Famine was spreading across China. It was witnessed by a group of Lanzhou University students who had been branded as Rightists and sent down to labor in the rural area of Tianshui. They saw countless peasants dying of hunger, and witnessed cannibalism.
Led by Zhang Chunyuan, a history student at Lanzhou University, they founded <i>Spark</i> in the hope of alerting people to the unfolding disaster and analyzing its root causes. The students pooled their money to buy a mimeograph machine, carved their own wax plates, and printed the first issue. The thirty-page publication featured Lin Zhao's long poem, "A Day in Prometheus's Passion." The first issue also featured articles, such as "The Current Situation and Duty," which dissected the tragic situation of society at that time and hoped that the revolution would be initiated by the Communist Party from within.
The students planned to send the magazine to the leaders of the provinces and cities with a view to correcting their mistakes. But before the first issue of Spark was mailed and while the second issue was still being edited, on September 30, 1960, these students in Wushan and Tianshui were arrested, along with dozens of local peasants who knew and supported them. Among them: Zhang Chunyuan was sentenced to life imprisonment and later executed; Du Yinghua, deputy secretary of the Wushan County Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for having interacted with the students, and later executed. Lin Zhao was detained and also executed. Other key members, such as Gu Yan, Tan Chanxue, and Xiang Chengjian, were all sentenced to long years in labor camps.
In the 1990s, Tan Chanxue devoted herself to researching historical information and figures to bring this history to life. She found in her personnel file (<i>dan'an</i>）photographs of the magazine, as well as self-confessions and other evidence used in the students' trial. Eventually, the photos were collated into PDFs, which began to circulate around China.
Editors' note: This site the original handwritten version and a PDF of all the articles from the first issue of <i>Spark</i>. We will also make available transcripts of the essays in Chinese and are searching for volunteers to translate the texts into English. Please contact us if you're interested in helping!
Article
Yang Kuisong: A Study of New China's "Counter-Revolutionary Suppression" Campaign
How many people were "killed," "imprisoned," and "controlled" in the whole "anti-revolution" campaign? Mao Zedong later said that 700,000 people were killed, 1.2 million were imprisoned, and 1.2 million were put under control. Mao's statement was naturally based on a report made in January 1954 by Xu Zirong, deputy minister of public security. Xu reported at the time that since the anti-revolution campaign, the country had arrested more than 262,000, of which "more than 712,000 counter-revolutionaries were killed, more than 12,900,000 were imprisoned, and 1,200,000 were put under control, and more than 380,000 were released through education because their crimes were not considered serious after their arrest." (3) Taking the figure of 712,000 executed, it already amounts to one and two-fourths thousandths of one percent of the country's 500 million people at that time. This figure is obviously much higher than the one-thousandth of a percent level originally envisioned by Mao Zedong.
Article
Yang Kuisong: The Beginning and End of the CCP's Seizure of the Northeast after the War
The occupation of the Northeast was key to the CCP's success in seizing power in 1949. The author of this book, Yang Kuisong, is a professor and doctoral director of the Department of History at East China Normal University, and a researcher at the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. This book describes the CCP's taking of the Northeast as well as the competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union at that time. After reading it, you will understand: how the Soviet Union played a key role in the CCP's occupation of the Northeast.