On August 8, 1966, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted the "Sixteen Articles" of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, Liu Wenhui, a young mechanic in Shanghai who had been labeled as a "rightist" in 1957, wrote pamphlets and leaflets clearly opposing the Cultural Revolution, the "Sixteen Articles", and authoritarianism and tyranny. He was arrested on November 26 of that year. Four months later, he was executed for "counter-revolutionary crimes." Liu Wenhui became the first person known to have been publicly shot for opposing the Cultural Revolution. The author of this book, Liu Wenzhong, was Liu Wenhui's co-defendant and survived thirteen years in prison. In this book, Liu Wenzhong describes in detail his brother Liu Wenhui's ideology as well as how he was killed by the tyrannical government.
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.
The year 2003 was known as the birth of the Weiquan—the rights defense–movement, which was marked by the Sun Zhigang incident in Guangzhou. At the same time, a campaign began to get justice for Huang Jing, a teacher from Hunan who was sexually assaulted and killed by her boyfriend. The campaign involved the victim’s family, netizens, feminist scholars and activists, and lasted for several years. This documentary records the process of Huang Jing’s case from filing to post-judgement, and analyzes the broader issue of sexual violence against women in China.
The films in this series are in Chinese with Chinese subtitles.
This book is a collection of political essays by Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. It is a sister volume to *Single-Edged Poisoned Sword - A Critique of Contemporary Nationalism in China*, which covers many aspects of Chinese politics, including: one-party dictatorship, powerful capitalism, rights defense, June Fourth, and nationalism.
This book is about Gu Zhun, a Chinese economist, historian and philosopher. Gu Zhun was the first person to put forward the theory of China's socialist market economy, which became a key concept in the Reform era, helping to justify the use of markets in a socialist system. He also devoted himself to the study of politics, history and philosophy, translating several foreign classic works on economics and democracy and writing a large number of articles. Due to his independent thinking and dissent, he suffered repeated political persecution, including during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution (for more information on Gu Zhun, see his biographical entry). As he personally experienced the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution, his diary is also considered a valuable source of information on these historical events. By documenting and analyzing his life, thoughts, and the eras in which he lived, Wang's book shows how Gu Zhun persisted in his "pursuit and search for the freedom and equal rights that are inherent to all human beings " (author's preface) in an era when independent thinking was suppressed. This book was published in 2015 by the Great Mountain Culture Publishing House in Hong Kong.
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.
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.
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.
This book is part of author Eva's "Famine Trilogy." Because her mother was a survivor of the famine in Gansu, Eva has obsessively pursued and recorded that tragic history. She visited a dozen counties in Gansu and Shaanxi four times and interviewed two hundred and fifty people. The list of starving victims recorded in the book is about eight hundred and thirty, while as many as one hundred and twenty-one incidents of cannibalism and cannibalistic phenomena were recorded.
This is the first book in author Eva's "Famine Trilogy," in which she traveled to Qin'an County, Tongwei County, and Tianshui District in Gansu Province as well as to Yaozhou and Tuxian County in Shaanxi Province in 2011. She interviewed more than two hundred survivors of the Great Famine, with the oldest person being ninety-five years old and the youngest being fifty-eight years old. This book allows these lowest class, mostly uneducated peasants to speak and provide their own witness, leaving behind their voices and oral history. Based on interviews with more than fifty interviewees, the book contains the names of more than five hundred victims and forty-nine incidents of cannibalism.
Hu Jie narrates the life of Lin Zhao, a Christian dissident who was condemned as a Rightist in the late 1950s and executed during the Cultural Revolution. Prior to becoming a mentcritic of the government, Lin Zhao was an ardent believer of communism. She demonstrated talent in writing and speaking as a star student in Peking University. However, after criticizing the government in 1957 during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, she was cast as anti-revolutionary. Despite the government’s attempts to silence her, Lin Zhao continued to speak and write publicly, including contributing two epic poems to Spark, an underground student-run journal. In 1960, she was arrested, and despite being released briefly in 1962, spent the rest of her life behind bars, under extremely poor living conditions. Nevertheless, she continued to write in prison, sometimes with her blood. In 1968, at the age of 36, she was executed by a firing squad.
In this documentary, Hu Jie showcases many of Lin Zhao’s surviving writings and poetry. These pieces often contain criticisms of the communist regime, as well as commentary on policy issues pertaining to labor and land reform. In making this film, Hu Jie traveled around China to interview friends and associates of Lin Zhao, who knew her as a student, activist, or prisoner. This documentary includes excerpts from interviews with them, which inform us about Lin Zhao’s personality and motivations.
This documentary has contributed to a widespread revival of interest in Lin Zhao, who had almost become a forgotten figure until the film’s appearance.
“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.
This book is part of writer Eva's "Famine Trilogy." It is also the only oral history monograph on women and children who fled the famine in Gansu and Shaanxi from 1958 to 1963 as of now. More than 1.3 million people starved to death in Gansu Province, the hardest-hit area of the Great Famine, and more than 100,000 women between the ages of 16 - 15 years old fled the famine and left Gansu. What happened to them and their children is one of the most tragic memories of the Great Famine.
Zhang Dongsun is an unavoidable but deliberately obscured figure in modern China. Considered the earliest translator of Western philosophy, a famous newspaperman, political commentator, and professor at Yenching University; the first mediator between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party in 1949, and the first Central People's Government Member. He was convicted of treason in 1951 and disappeared. The well-known writer and journalist Dai Qing completed this historical documentary after eight years of investigation and writing and nearly ten years of revising and updating. Taking Zhang Dongsun's life as the main theme, he wrote about changing times from the late Qing dynasty to the Cultural Revolution.
An expanded edition of this book will be published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in 2022. The following is the link to purchase books from the publisher:
https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3466
This book is a complete record of the entire process of the forceful clearing of Tiananmen Square in 1989, which began at noon on June 3, 1989, and ended at 10:00 a.m. on June 4th. The author, Wu Renhua, who experienced the June Fourth Incident, describes some of the important events and characters in the book. For example, how Liu Xiaobo, Hou Dejian and other "Four Gentlemen" contacted and negotiated with the PLA martial law forces; how the tanks of the six departments chased and crushed the evacuating students; and how the medical staff put their own lives at risk to save the wounded in the rain of bullets and bullets. The first draft of this book was completed in May 1990, according to Wu Renhua's own account. He fled the mainland in 1992. In May 2007, he published *Inside the Bloody Clearance of Tiananmen Square* in Los Angeles. This was his first monograph on June Fourth. The book has since been updated and reprinted several times.
A five-part documentary by the filmmaker and feminist scholar Ai Xiaoming on the persecution of inmates at the Jiabiangou labor camp in Jiuquan, Gansu province, where more than 2,000 people died. The movie includes interviews with the few remaining survivors and documents efforts to commemorate the dead. The director interviewed survivors of Jiabiangou and the children of the victims and listened to their stories about the past; she also found former correctional officers and their descendants to understand the causes of labor camps and the Great Famine from different angles.
Shot by Ai and a team of volunteers, the film presents the conflict between the preservation and destruction of memory.
The Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989 and the subsequent mass arrests and purges created tens of thousands of June Fourth victims. Among them were June Fourth victims who fell into a pool of blood, the June Fourth disabled who were shot, the families of the June Fourth victims and the severely disabled, the June Fourth prisoners of conscience who were sentenced to imprisonment or re-education-through-labor, and the June Fourth victims who were subjected to other political persecution. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of June Fourth, as part of Chinese civil society's efforts to recover the historical truth and rebuild historical memory, this report gives a basic description of the suffering of the June Fourth victims and their arduous journey over the past 20 years. It also analyzes the systemic factors that have contributed to the victims' suffering and proposes corresponding recommendations on how to change their living conditions.
During the three years of famine from 1959 to 1961, Tongwei's unnatural deaths due to starvation and its related factors amounted to one-third of the county's population. Mr. Zhang Dafa, who worked in Tongwei for many years and later took part in the preparation of the new Tongwei County Record. Published in 2005 through the Dingxi Writers' Association, this is a collection of his many social research reports on the Tongwei issue, "Jinqiao Luwan," which profoundly reveals the tragedy and gravity of the Great Famine, a man-made disaster, within the boundaries of a single county.