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When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Yang Xiaokai was a senior high school student at No. 1 Middle School in Changsha. On January 12, 1968, he published an article entitled "Where is China Going?" which systematically put forward the ideas of the "ultra-leftist" Red Guards, criticized the privileged bureaucratic class in China, and advocated for the establishment of a Chinese People's Commune based on the principles of the Paris Commune. Yang Xiaokai recalled that his parents were beaten because they sympathized with Liu Shaoqi's and Peng Dehuai's views, and that he was discriminated against at school and could not join the Red Guards. As a result, he joined the rebel faction to oppose the theory of descent. Yang Xiaokai was later sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for this article. Yang Xiaokai died in 2004. This article is a retrospective of his life.

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.