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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.
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!
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
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 Collected Works of He Jiadong
He Jiadong is a Chinese publisher. He joined the Chinese Communist Party at an early age. After 1949, he founded the Workers' Publishing House, one of the propaganda mouthpieces of the CCP. In 1957, he was designated as a rightist and later labeled as an anti-Party element. In 1965, Kang Sheng criticized him. He was sent down to Chengwu County in Shandong Province, where he was put under local control for 14 years. During the Cultural Revolution, he was taken back to Beijing and criticized, which affected his family and led to the unnatural death of his mother and two sons. In 1979, after the rightist was corrected and completely rehabilitated, he became the executive vice-president and deputy editor-in-chief of the Workers' Publishing House; in 1983, he founded the monthly <i>Rensheng (Life)</i>. In 1984, he founded <i>Kaituo (Pioneering)</i> magazine. He was investigated for publishing Liu Binyan's <i>The Second Kind of Loyalty</i>, and resigned from his post in 1985. The above weekly newspapers, bimonthly magazines and websites were all suspended and closed by the authorities. He has written a large number of articles exploring China's development path from the end of authoritarianism to constitutional democracy. He himself had a 60-year career as a "red publisher" but never had the freedom to publish. Even his own collection of essays was never published. Until the end of his life, he never saw a printed volume of his essays—the printed books were seized and confiscated by the Chinese authorities.
The book can be purchased <a href="https://www.fellowspress.com/shop1/p/-4"> link</a>.
Film and Video
The Gulag Book
This movie records how Zhang Xianzhi went from being a soldier to a prisoner and then to an independent writer. His experience and thought process is compared with that of the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn. The title of the film is taken from the title of Zhang Xianzhi's book <i>Anecdotes from the Gulag</i>, which takes the viewer on a journey to China's Gulag Archipelago, a labor camp in Sichuan. The extreme conditions and little-known tragic history of the camp are presented. The movie is 42 minutes long and was filmed in 2012.
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
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
Tribute to Gao Hua
Gao Hua was a renowned Chinese historian who died of liver cancer in Nanjing in 2011 at the age of 57. During his lifetime, Prof. Gao Hua focused on modern Chinese history. He was an expert in the history of the CCP and Mao Zedong. Several of his books were published overseas, and his book “The Revolutionary Years” was the only one published on the mainland. His masterpiece, “How the Red Sun Rises - The Ins and Outs of the Yan'an Rectification Movement”, was considered a classic work on CCP history when it was published in Hong Kong, but it soon became a banned book. Through this documentary, director Hu Jie records Gao Hua's voice and laughter during his lifetime, expressing the deep feelings of people mourning and commemorating Gao Hua.
Film and Video
Xu Zhiyong
Chinese human rights activist Dr. Xu Zhiyong, twice imprisoned for his longstanding advocacy of civil society in China, was sentenced to 14 years in prison by the Chinese government in April 2023. The documentary by independent director Lao Hu Miao was filmed over a four-year period, beginning with the seizure of the Public League Legal Research Center, which Xu Zhiyong helped found in 2009, and ending with Xu's first prison sentence in 2014.
Book
Yangmou - The Beginning and End of the Anti-Rightist Movement
The revised edition of this book was published by *Open Magazine* in Hong Kong in 2007. The first edition was published in 1991 and was revised and reprinted twice, in 1993 and 1995. The book collects a large amount of information about the anti-rightist movement, including survey interviews with victims of the anti-rightist movement and their relatives and friends. It is a complete record of the anti-rightist movement, which comprehensively analyzes and discusses the whole process of the anti-rightist movement, as well as its ins and outs, causes and consequences. Regarding the number of "rightists," the statistics of the CCP authorities had been limited to 550,000 people. According to Ding Lyric's analysis, there were about 1.2 million people who were labeled as "rightists" in the Anti-Rightist Movement.
Book
Yangtze Yangtze
In March 1989, the book Yangtze Yangtze was published by the Guizhou People's Publishing House just as the Tiananmen student protests were about to begin in Beijing. The book fed into this intellectual ferment, challenging the technocratic reasons for the Three Gorges Dam, which eventually would dam the Yangtze River in the name of flood control and electrical power generation.
The book was edited by the journalist Dai Qing, the daughter of a well-known Communist Party activist and leader. The book challenged the project's decision-making process, with a broad array of scientists, journalists, and intellectuals arguing that it was not democratic and did not take into account all viewpoints. It was widely read in China and translated into foreign languages.
After the Tiananmen protests were violently suppressed, Dai Qing was arrested and imprisoned for ten months in Qincheng Prison as an organizer of the uprising. Yangtze Yangtze was criticized as “promoting bourgeois liberalization, opposing the Four Fundamental Principles (of party control), and creating public opinion for turmoil and riots.” The book was taken off the shelves and destroyed, with some copies burned. It became the first banned book resulting from the decision-making process of the Three Gorges Project.
The book is banned in China. The English-language edition can be read online at Probe International: https://journal.probeinternational.org/three-gorges-probe/yangtze-yangtze/.