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Film and Video
Spark
<i>Spark</i> tells the story of a group of young intellectuals who risked their lives to voice their opinions about the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s. Following the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957, many intellectuals were branded as Rightists and banished to work and live in rural China. A group of students from Lanzhou University were among those sent to the countryside. There, they witnessed mass famine which resulted from government policies to collectivize agriculture and force industrialization in rural China. Shocked and angered by the government’s lack of response to the Great Famine, these students banded together to publish <i>Spark</i>, an underground magazine that sought to alert the Chinese population of the unfolding famine. The first issue, printed in 1960, included poems and articles analyzing the root causes of failed policies. However, as the first issue of <i>Spark</i> was mailed and the second issue was edited, many of these students, along with locals who supported the team, were arrested. Some of the key members of the publication were sentenced to life imprisonment and later executed, while others spent decades in labor camps.
In this 2014 documentary, Hu Jie uncovers the stories of the people involved in the publication of <i>Spark</i>. He conducts interviews with former members of the magazine who survived persecution, and also shows footage of the manuscripts of the magazine. A digital copy of the original manuscript of the first volume of <i>Spark</i> is also held on our website.
This film was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Chinese Documentary at the 2014 Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival and the Award of Excellence in the Asian Competition. Later, it won the Independent Spirit Award at the Beijing Independent Film Festival.
Book
Sparks: A Chronicle of the Rightist Counter-Revolutionary Group at Lanzhou University
During the worst years of the 1960 famine, a group of teachers and students at Lanzhou University decided to publish an underground publication, <i>Spark</i>, to alert Chinese people to the growing disaster and expose the authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party. Only two issues of this underground publication were printed before it was broken up as a counter-revolutionary group case and 43 people were arrested.
The author of this book, Tan Chanxue, was a key participant and helped save the memory of <i>Spark</i> from being lost. Tan was the girlfriend of Zhang Chunyuan, the magazine's founder, and participated in key moments of the magazine's short lifespan. She was sentenced to 14 years in prison, but was later released and rehabilitated, and taught at the Jiuquan Teachers' Training School. In 1982, she was transferred to the Dunhuang Research Institute as an associate researcher, and retired in 1998, settling in Shanghai.
It is largely through Tan's efforts that we know about <i>Spark</i>. She was able to look into her personnel file (<i>dang'an</i>), where she discovered the issues of the magazine, as well as confessions of the people arrested, and even her love letters to Zhang. She photographed this material and later it was turned into PDFs, which circulated around China starting in the late 1990s, helping to inspire books and movies.
Book
Summer of 1957: From One Hundred Schools of Thought to Two Schools of Thought
This book comprehensively records and analyzes the Anti-Rightist Campaign.
The author Zhu Zheng was born in 1931. He was once the editor of Hunan People's Publishing House and a well-known expert on Lu Xun in China. He was classified as a Rightist in 1957 and personally experienced the Anti-Rightist Campaign. This book references information from CCP party newspapers at that time, as well as his recollections, making this book informative and reliable.
The "two dueling schools of thought" in the subtitle of this book comes from The Selected Works of Mao Zedong. Mao called for one hundred schools of thought to contend but in fact only intended for two to compete: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
This book was first published by Henan People's Publishing House in 1998. It is one of the earliest studies of the movement in China.
Book
Ten Years of War: A Memoir of Sino-Soviet Relations 1956-1966
The author of this book explains the relations between the two parties before and after the 1956-1966 Sino-Soviet War and the main process of the Sino-Soviet War as a first-hand witness. Since Stalin's death and Khrushchev's rise to power, Sino-Soviet relations have been characterized by a series of exchanges over the internal relations between the socialist party and the socialist country, the relations with the "imperialists", how to build socialism, and the national question. As a personal witness to this period, the author tells the truth about history as he knows it. This book was originally published on the mainland in 1993.
Book
Ten-Year History of the Cultural Revolution, The
The authors of this book, Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, are a married couple. Both are scholars at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Yan was the first director of the Institute of Political Science at the CASS and was involved in the Political Reform Office under Premier Zhao Ziyang. The couple went into exile in the U.S. after the June 4 Incident. The book was published by the Tianjin Publishing House in 1986. With a circulation of more than one million copies, many people began to learn about the full history of the Cultural Revolution from this book.
Book
The Age of Great Unrest: China 1949-1989
The author of this book, Wang Nianyi (1932 - September 13, 2007), was an expert on the history of the Cultural Revolution. He has a clear understanding of the causes and circumstances of the Cultural Revolution. He is regarded as doing "pioneering work" in China's domestic study of the Cultural Revolution. According to Qizhi's recollection, Wang Nianyi compiled <i>Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution</i>, <i>The First Year of the Cultural Revolution</i>, <i>Dictionary of the Cultural Revolution</i>, <i>Miscellaneous Discourses on the Cultural Revolution</i>, and <i>Research Materials on the Cultural Revolution</i>, which have not been published in China.
Book
The Brothers Mingjian Xue & Yefang Sun
This book concerns two Chinese economists, Xue Mingjian and Sun Yefang. Xue Mingjian (1895-1980, former name Xue Epei, he changed his name after joining the volunteer student armies during the 1911 revolution - Mingjian (明剑) meant “to eliminate the Qing government with sword and revenge on behalf of the Ming Dynasty (剑除满清，为朱明报复)” ) was "the founder of modern Chinese national enterprise economics, the pioneer of modern national industry, a civil society activist, educator and scholar" (author's preface). He served as a delegate to the National People's Congress of the Republic of China, Senate member of the Kuomintang, and a popularly elected legislator. Sun Yefang (1908-1983, former name Xue Eguo, he changed his name out of security concern after the incident that he got arrested by KMT when he was a underground CCP member), by contrast, a member of the Communist Party of China, was an important economist in post-1949 China, who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and regained attention and respect after the reform and opening-up period. The author tells the story of the two brothers' very different life trajectories, while pointing out that even though they were in different political camps, their concern for and practice of humanitarianism were in fact the same.
The book was first published by China SDX Joint Publishing in 2009, and was to be reprinted by Economic Press China in 2014, but it was censored. The version in our archive is published by Boden House in 2023.
Book
The Doubtful Clouds of 1957-- Cracking the Code of the Anti-Rightist Movement
The Anti-Rightist Movement in China began in 1957 with the reorganization of intellectuals, followed by the Great Leap Forward, the People's Commune, and a series of calamities such as the Great Famine. The Hong Kong Five Sevens Society was founded in 2007 with the aim of collecting, organizing, and researching historical information about the Anti-Rightist Movement. It is headed by Wu Yisan, a writer who moved to Hong Kong from mainland China. The author of this book, Shen Yuan, who was also a Rightist at the time. He has systematically researched and organized the Anti-Rightist Movement that took place in 1957 and attempted to answer some of the unanswered questions.
Book
The Great Leap Forward: An Intimate Memoir
Li Rui, who once served as Mao's secretary, is also an expert on Mao Zedong. Like his famous <i>Proceedings of the Lushan Conference</i>, this book is also an important historical work. It focuses on the author's personal experience of the Great Leap Forward initiated by Mao Zedong.
Book
The Legendary Marriage of A Legendary Writer
The author, Wu Yue, was the editor of several media including Yuwen Chubanshe. This book, as his memoir, recreates his personal destiny in different social situations, including the anti-rightist and Cultural Revolution and other special times, the frustrations of a generation of intellectuals held hostage in the political wave. The book tells the story of the author's many marriages and love affairs under special political circumstances. It also analyzes the deformity and absurdity of the political re-education through the labor system as well as the impact on humanity.
Book
The Lost Generation: China's Sending to the Countryside Movement (1968-1980)
After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, 1,700 Chinese urban youths were deported to the countryside from 1968 to 1980. This was an organized population transfer and a radical political movement that was named the "Going to the Countryside" movement. It was unprecedented. The movement had a profound impact on a whole generation of young people in China's towns and cities. Not only did it disrupt their lives and deprive them of education, it also affected their families and society as a whole. This book by French sinologist Michel Bonnin reveals the ins and outs of this movement. It also explores its deep imprint on China's society, politics, and economy as well as the historical place it occupies.
Book
The Private Life of Chairman Mao
Author Li Zhisui served as Mao's medical team leader and was the first director of the PLA's San 105 Hospital. This book is a memoir that he wrote. It details Li Zhisui's information from 1954, when he started as Mao's personal physician, to 1976, when Mao died, a period of 22 years. In his writing, Mao's private life is extremely absurd and touches on all aspects of the struggle against some of the CCP's personnel. After the book was published in Taiwan, it was completely banned on the mainland.
Originally written in English, the book was translated into English by Hongchao Dai, former head of the political science department at the University of Detroit, with a foreword by China expert Andrew James Nathan, and with Anne F. Thurston as an assistant editor. was published in English by Blue Lantern Books in 1994. The Chinese edition was translated from the English with the assistance of Shushan Liao and published by Taiwan Times Culture in 1994. Lee died in the United States in February 1995, six months after the book was published.
Book
The Realm of Historiography
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.
Book
The Vladimirov Diaries: Yenan, China 1942~1945
The author of The Vladimirov Diaries: Yenan, China, 1942~1945, Peter Vladimirov (Sun Ping in Chinese) was a Soviet citizen. The book was first published in the 1980s by Oriental Publishing House and reprinted in March 2004. Peter traveled to Yan'an from 1942 to 1945 as a liaison officer of the Comintern and a correspondent for the TASS news agency. He kept a diary of the political, economic and cultural aspects of Yan'an, including its opium economy. Against the background of the relationship between the CCP and the Soviet Union during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, the book describes the CCP's Rectification Movement and the Seventh National Congress. It also comments on the CCP's contact with the U.S. Military Observer Group stationed in Yan'an at the time and on the relationship between the CCP and the Kuomintang.
Book
Thirty Years of New China
Tang Degang is a historian and biographer who specializes in oral history. In the latter half of his life, he settled in the United States and taught at Columbia University and the City University of New York. In the field of history, he put forward the "Three Gorges Theory of History", which divides the change of Chinese social system into three major stages: feudalism, imperialism, and civil rule. The book was originally titled <i>Mao Zedong's Dictatorship, 1949~1976</i>, but was renamed <i>Thirty Years of New China </i> when it was released on the mainland.
Film and Video
Though I Am Gone
On August 5, 1966, Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old vice principal of the Girls High School affiliated with Beijing Normal University, was beaten to death. The murder was by some of her students, a group of female Red Guards from the school. Bian was the first educator to be killed in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. The night Bian was killed, Deng Xiaoping's two daughters, Deng Nan and Deng Rong, found Bian's husband and told him that they could only say that Bian died of high blood pressure due to illness, but not that Bian was killed. In the end, no one was criminally prosecuted.
This film is widely regarded as one of Hu Jie's most famous for its portrayal of Bian's husband, Wang Jingyao, and his efforts to document his wife's murder.
Follow director Hu Jie on his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@jiehu6613">YouTube channel</a>.
Article
Wang Nianyi, He Shu, and Chen Zhao: Mao Zedong's "September 13th Lin Biao Escape Incident"
Wang Nianyi is an expert on the history of the Cultural Revolution in China. Early on, he suggested that Lin Biao's defection was forced by Mao Zedong. This has long been considered a taboo view in China.