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Book
Blood Chronicle: From the Anti-Rightist Movement to the Cultural Revolution
The author of this book, Kong Lingping, who lives in Chongqing, was labeled as a rightist in his youth. He has lived through all the political movements of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This book is based on the author's own experience, from birth to 2009.
Book
Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao's China
This book is the brainchild of Prof. Lian Xi of Duke University, U.S.A. In March 2018, it was published in English by Basic Books in the U.S.A. In 2021, it was published in Chinese by Taiwan Business Press. Based on a large amount of historical materials as well as first-hand interviews, this book reconstructs Lin Zhao's life. It depicts the political development before and after the birth of New China, and presents the resilient will and beliefs of intellectuals in this era.
To purchase this book, please visit [the publisher](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/lian-xi/blood-letters/9781541644229/?lens=basic-books), or a bookseller.
Book
China's "Left Scourge"
The author of this book, Lu Jianhua (pen name Wen Lu), was a former member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who published this book in 1993. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2005 for "allegedly leaking state secrets" in connection with the "espionage case" involving journalist Cheng Xiang.
Book
Chronicle of Jiabiangou
Jiabiangou was a labor reform farm in Jiuquan County, Gansu Province, where "rightist" prisoners were held. October 1957, nearly 3,000 educated people were detained there. In October 1961, when the higher-ups corrected the "left-leaning" mistakes of the Gansu Provincial Party Committee and began repatriating the rightist prisoners, less than half had survived.
Writer Yang Xianhui spent five years interviewing more than a hundred people and brought to light the truth that had been sealed for more than forty years. Originally published by Tianjin Ancient Books Publishing House in 2002, this book also includes other short and medium-sized stories by Yang Xianhui.
Book
Dictionary of Names of 1957 Victims
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.
Book
Experience: My 1957
Born in 1932, He Fengming and her husband Wang Jingchao were both labeled "rightists" during their work at the Gansu Daily Newspaper. In late April 1958, they were sent down to work at the Anxi Farm in Jiuquan. Her husband was sent to the famed Jibiangou Farm, where he died of starvation during the famine of 1960, but she survived. In order to refuse to forget, she spent ten years writing a 400,000-dollar self-narrative, *Experience - My 1957*. The book was published by Dunhuang Literary Publishing House in 2001.
Book
Gan Cui: The Soul of Peking University-From Lin Zhao to the 1989 Democracy Movement
This book was originally published in the series *Micro Traces of the Past* - Documentary Volume - No. 6, edited by Huang Heqing, founded in 2007. Gan Cui, a student at Renmin University of China, was classified as a rightist in 1957. He became lovers with Lin Zhao, a rightist student who came from Peking University to work in the data room. Gan Cui was later sent to Xinjiang. When he returned, he learned that Lin Zhao had been killed. This book (in 140,000 words) is a manuscript of Gan Cui's memories of Lin Zhao in the context of the 1989 pro-democracy movement.
Book
Gu Zhun Diary
This book contains the only three surviving diaries of Gu Zhun: one from October 1959 to January 1960 when he was exile to work in a labor camp in Shangcheng, Henan Province, one from October 1969 to September 1971 when he was sent to work in the May Seventh Cadre School in Xi County, Henan Province, and one from October 1972 to October 1974 when he returned to Beijing. The first two diaries, written during the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution, record the tragedies Gu Zhun witnessed during the Great Famine as well as his own endurance of hunger, and how he underwent repeated punishment and ideological education as a Rightist. The third diary is a simple record of his life, but it shows that Gu Zhun spent the last two years of his life almost exclusively in reading, translating and writing. Since he personally experienced the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution, these three diaries are considered a valuable source of information about these historical events. In addition to Gu Zhun's diary, the book includes Gu Zhun's translation manuscript of a chapter on Christianity in English political scientist George Catlin’s book *A History of Political Philosophers* published in 1939. The book also includes his last letter to his sixth brother Chen Minzhi, several articles by other people commemorating Gu Zhun, and interviews with Gu Zhun's close friends. The book was published by the Economic Daily Press in 1997.
Book
History of the Chinese Thought Movement
This book is a masterpiece by Chinese scholar Li Honglin. The author was a representative of the ideological liberation movement during reform and opening up and was arrested after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. This book summarizes the various ideological purges launched by the CCP since its establishment in 1949.
Book
Holy Virgin on the Altar - A Biography of Lin Zhao, The
This book is a biography of Lin Zhao written by mainland writer Zhao Rui and published by Taiwan's Xiuwei Information Publishing House in 2008. The book describes Lin Zhao's life and family background in detail. The "Appendix" contains the recollections of several people involved.Purchase link: https://www.books.com.tw/products/0010431680.
Book
Hu Yaobang and the Vindication of Wrongful Convictions.
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.
Book
In Search of My Homeland
“In Search of My Homeland” is a collection of essays in three volumes written by Gao Ertai during his exile abroad. In this book, Gao looks back on his life. From his hometown of Gaochun, a small town in Jiangsu Province, to Suzhou, then to Lanzhou, Jiuquan, Dunhuang, Beijing, Chengdu, and the United States, Gao has undergone tremendous suffering, lost his home and family, and finally had to go into exile in a foreign country. Even though the work is widely regarded as having great literary merit, Gao uses real names and places, which makes the work a valuable historical document, especially for describing the Great Famine, and the brutal suppression of intellectual life during the Cultural Revolution at the Dunhuang research academy, which is one of China's most prestigious cultural institutions.
In an [interview](https://web.archive.org/web/20240130211408/https://www.aisixiang.com/data/80804.html), Gao explained why he wrote the book: "Searching for my homeland is nothing but searching for meaning.... Life is short and small, and its meaning can only be rooted in the external world and in the long history. My sense of drift and meaninglessness, that is, a feeling that the world has no order, history has no logic, and the individual has no home, seems to be a kind of destiny. My writing is nothing but a resistance to this destiny."
In 2004, a censored version of the first two volumes of this book was published by Huacheng Publishing House in Guangzhou; in 2011, an updated version was published by Beijing October Arts and Literature Publishing House, but still censored. The version uploaded to our archive is the traditional Chinese version of the complete three volumes published by Taiwan INK Publishing House in 2009.
Book
Journey of Grace, The
Li Jinghang, a native of Tianshui City, Gansu Province, 1922-2016, graduated from the Mathematics Department of the Northwest Normal College in 1949. In the fall of the same year, he was employed as a mathematics teacher at Tianshui No. 1 Middle School. In 1957, he was wrongly classified as a Rightist and sent to Jiuquan, Gansu Province to be reeducated through labor for nearly three years; in 1960, he resumed his work as a teacher at Tianshui No. 1 Middle School. In 1962, he removed his hat as a Rightist. He was rehabilitated in 1978. In 1980, he was transferred to Tianshui Teachers' College (which was upgraded to an undergraduate institution in 2000). After retiring in the fall of 1987, he joined the Church to serve full-time.
In 1957, Li Jinghang was labeled a rightist and sent to Jiabiangou for re-education through labor. In 1960, he was transferred to the Mingshuihe Farm in Gaotai, where the conditions were even worse, and he was subjected to a great deal of torture and abuse. The fourth chapter of his autobiography, "Chronicle of the bitter life in Jiabiangou," and the fifth chapter, "Chronicle of the life after returning home," are written about his bitter experience in Jiabiangou. From this, we can see the glory of humanity and the power of faith in the midst of suffering. This book was published by a Hong Kong Tianma Book Company Limited in 2003, with a print run of 2,000 copies, and reprinted once in 2004.
Book
Lin Zhao: No Longer Forgotten
This book contains a number of articles in memory of Lin Zhao. It concerns the death of Lin Zhao as well as Lin Zhao's love, pursuits, and disillusionment. This book was published by Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House in 2000.
Book
Liushahe Essay
Liushahe is a famous Chinese writer and scholar, who entered Sichuan University in the fall of 1949, and was criticized and stigmatized nationwide during the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement for his work *Grass and Trees* named by Mao Zedong himself, and then subjected to a variety of labor reforms (building roads during the day and sawing wood in the evening) for a cumulative total of 20 years. In 1979, he was transferred back to the Sichuan Provincial Literature Federation. Since 1985 he has been writing full-time, and has published a number of books, including *Essays on the Liusha River*. This book was published by Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House in 1995. Many of the essays are related to his experiences when he was under labor reform. In November 2019, Liushahe passed away in Chengdu at the age of 88 due to illness.
Book
Mao in Power (1949-1976)
The author of this book, Shan Shaojie, is a scholar from mainland China. For several years, he wrote this book from an independent position. Former political secretary of Mao Zedong, Li Rui, and Princeton University professor, Yu Yingshi, wrote the foreword for this book. In addition to a systematic account of the Maoist era, Shan Shaojie's book "Mao in Power" emphasizes that almost all members of the Communist Party's highest decision-making echelons, with the exception of Mao Zedong, made efforts, in varying degrees and successively, to stop Mao's insanity. Moreover, they took turns to resist and ultimately to leave Mao alone, but did not really stop Mao's madness. This book was published by Linking Publishing in 2001 and has been reprinted several times.
Book
Mao: The Unknown Story
This book presents the dramatic life of Mao Zedong, revealing a wealth of unheard-of facts: why Mao joined the Communist Party, how he came to sit at the top of the Chinese Communist Party, and how he seized China step by step. Writers Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday took ten years to complete this book, interviewing hundreds of Mao's relatives and friends, Chinese and foreign informants and witnesses who worked and interacted with Mao as well as dignitaries from various countries.
Purchase link：https://www.amazon.com/Mao-Story-Jung-Chang/dp/0679746323.
Book
New Biographies of the 1957 Rightists
According to official CCP statistics, some 550,000 people were directly labeled as rightists and persecuted during the Anti-Rightist campaign. These people, as well as others implicated in the campaign, are mostly unknown, except for a very few. The author, Shen Yuan, who was also labeled as a rightist when he was a university student in 1958, devoted himself to collecting and researching historical data on the anti-rightist campaign. He has compiled a book entitled Biographies of the 1957 Rightists, which attempts to present the truth about the Anti-Rightist campaign and its victims. The book is divided into four volumes of about 1.2 million words, containing the stories of about 600 rightists and about 240 historical photographs. 2016 marked the 60th anniversary of the Anti-Rightist campaign, and Shen Yuan used the original book as the basis for his New Biographies of the 1957 Rightists, expanding the number of people included to 1,588. Sha Yexin and Wu Yisan were both involved in the compilation of this book.
Book
Personal experiences of political movements
This book is a collection of many authors, most of whom were former senior officials of the Communist Party of China, such as Li Rui, Xiao Ke and others. Through the author's recollections, we can learn about the political movements of the Mao Zedong era, including the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Movement, etc., as well as the details of many unjust cases, such as the Hu Feng case, which is quite convincing. This book was published by the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau Press in mainland China in 1998.
book
Return of the Soul from Purgatory: Memoirs of a Survivor of the "Sparks" Case from the Great Famine Era
In 1960, a group of faculty and students from Lanzhou University, who had been labeled Rightists and sent down to rural areas in Tianshui, Gansu, personally experienced the Great Famine. They self-published <i>Spark</i> magazine to expose and criticize the totalitarian rule that led to this catastrophe.<i>Spark</i> only published one issue before its participants were arrested and labeled as a counterrevolutionary group. Many were sentenced to long prison terms, and some were even executed. <a href=“http://108.160.154.72/s/china-unofficial/item/1759#lg=1&slide=0”>The first issue of <i>Spark</i> and more information about the "Spark Case" can be read here</a>.
<i>Return from Purgatory: A Survivor’s Memoir of the ‘Spark Case’ in the Great Famine Years (1957–1981)</i> is the autobiography of Xiang Chengjian, a key participant in <i>Spark</i> magazine. At the time, he and another student were responsible for printing the first issue, and he contributed six articles to <i>Spark</i>. Due to his involvement, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in the Spark case and was not rehabilitated until the early 1980s.
This memoir is divided into three sections, with a total of thirteen chapters spanning over 350,000 characters. It documents Xiang’s journey from being labeled a Rightist and sent to perform forced labor, to his arrest and 19-year imprisonment for his involvement in <i>Spark</i>, and finally to his struggle for rehabilitation and efforts to rebuild his life after release. In the book’s preface, scholar Ai Xiaoming offers the following assessment:
"Xiang Chengjian’s memoir holds significant value for the study of the intellectual history of contemporary China. First, it serves as another important testimony of the “Spark Case”, following Tan Chanxue’s memoir <i><a href=“”>Sparks: A Chronicle of the Rightist Counter-Revolutionary Group at Lanzhou University</a></i>, making it a crucial historical document on this act of resistance. The author reconstructs the social context before and after the case and describes how the young intellectuals behind <i>Spark</i> bravely challenged totalitarian rule. Second, the book provides a detailed account of labor camps in western China, with the author documenting his 18 years of forced labor in Gansu and Qinghai, unveiling a western chapter of China’s Gulag system. Third, it is a deeply personal intellectual history of a resister, showing the immense suffering, trials of life and death, and personal resilience under the crushing force of state violence."
The book’s appendix includes Xiang Chengjian’s six articles for <i>Spark</i>, an in-depth investigative report on him by journalist Jiang Xue, and a chronological record of the Spark Case compiled by Ai Xiaoming.
<i>Return from Purgatory</i> is published by Borden Press in New York and is the first book in the “People’s Archives Series”, published by the China Unofficial Archives. The author, Xiang Chengjian, has generously authorized the archive to share the book’s digital edition. Readers are encouraged to purchase the book to support the author and publisher.